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momoshin · 3 years

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Ryujin fluffy alphebet a-z 🥺🥺

A = Activities (What do they like to do with you? How do you spend your free time together?)

PICNICS! making your own food (or buying it sometimes) and setting a blanket in the middle of a nice park where kids and dogs could be easily spotted. she’ll ask you to read poetry to her, play her guitar for you, you’ll sing together, just two fools in love. also, scrapbooking! it’s something you both discovered you liked doing together very early on in your relationship.

B = Beauty (What do they admire about you? What do they think is your most beautiful feature?)

loves your lips, eyes and waist. she loves kissing you, but just looking at your lips makes her heart race, same with your eyes, she could keep eye contact with you forever, she just loves everything about them. and your waist is her hand’s favorite place, whether you’re sitting or standing, one if not both of her hands will always be on your waist.

C = Comfort (How would they help you when you feel down/have a panic attack etc.?)

ryujin won’t bother to pull you aside, she doesn’t care if there’s anyone around, she will stop what she’s doing once she sees any signs of you struggling and asks if you need a breather or if she can help in any way, if you say no, she will stay by your side and let her hands run up and down your back to help you calm down, will hug you if you let her and tuck her chin on top of your head while humming melodies to you.

D = Dates (What are dates with them like?)

she’s so selfless, even with dates she’s always making sure you’re comfortable with wherever and whatever you’re doing, hands always entangled and she’s always willing to pay for whatever you want

E = Equal (Are they the dominant one in the relationship, or rather passive?)

dominant for sure, whether it’d be in bed or not

F = Fights (Would they forgive you easily? What are they like while fighting with you?)

she would hate fighting, the possibility of upsetting you to the point where you’d rather sleep on the couch than with her terrifies her, and as soon as you grab your pillow and a blanket, she grabs your wrist and tries to convince you to stay with her, puppy eyes full of apologies that her words couldnt quite express

G = Gratitude (How grateful are they in general? Are they aware of what you are doing for them?)

SO grateful, ryujin is generally grateful for her life, where she is and such, but she always thanks you for doing small things for her, making her breakfast, anything really.

H = Hugs (What is their favorite way to hug and cuddle you?)

she personally loves when you casually come up to her and without interrupting her conversation, press up against her and wrap her arms around your shoulders yourself.

I = Inspiration (Did you change them somehow, or the other way around? Like trying out new things or helped them overcome personal problems?)

ryujin definitely holds less grudges ever since she met you, she doesn’t feel the need to see the people who have made her suffer, suffer, she doesn’t feel the need to prove herself to anyone, doesn’t listen to mean comments or people who just want to bring her down.

J = Jealousy (Do they get jealous easily? How do they deal with it?)

mm depends ? she trusts you more than anyone, and she trusts both your friends, so when she gets jealous its more of a “why the fuck is that guy looking at my girlfriend like he wants to eat her” kind of thing, it usually involves someone she’s never seen before, and it leads to her walking over to the two of you and not so subtly placing a hand on your waist, calling you all sorts of nicknames while glaring at them

K = Kisses (Who initiated the first kiss? What kind of kisser are they? Shy? Passionate?)

she initiated the first kiss! she’ll peck your lips so many times in the day but as soon as she has the chance she will pull you to the side and get her well earned dose of kisses. her kisses usually range from short, repeated pecks, they are goofy at times, sensual even, and she finds herself biting your lip gently every once in a while

L = Love Confession (How would they confess to you?)

in bed, the two of you looking at each other silently and then she just says all these things that sounds like she’s proposing because it’s so detailed and you can tell she loves you so much it’s quite inevitable for you to cry or get teary eyed as she talks about everything she loves about how and how good you make her feel

M = Marriage (Do they want to get married? How do they propose? What would your marriage be like?)

Yes but not yet, she would probably propose at a meaningful place for your relationship, and i have this vivid image of her wearing a bodysuit like the one for the gda’s last year for her wedding, she’d let you make the important decisions but would be completely involved whenever you asked for her opinion and would try to help as much as she could so it didn’t all pile up for you.

as for marriage, i think the dynamic would fit you both perfectly, the shiny bands on your hands, loves the way ‘my wife’ slips off her tongue as she introduces you to someone, or whenever someone asks you about each other and uses the ‘your wife’ it just gives you both butterflies all over again.

N = Nicknames (What do they call you?)

baby, angel, my love, short versions of your name sometimes!

O = On Cloud Nine (What are they like when they are in love? Is it obvious for others? How do they express their feelings?)

everyone can notice, it’s like an aura she carries around and she’s instantly bubblier, in situations that maybe would’ve gotten a rise out of her she’s more patient, she’ll be nicer to her members and such,, she makes sure to text you good morning and good night, throughout the day, that she misses you, that she loves you, sends you small details when she can’t make it to deliver them personally, just always reminding you of her appreciation, besides, she never shuts up about you, her members claim are sick and tired of hearing ‘y/n this, y/n that’ but in reality, they love seeing ryujin so happy and loved.

P = Parent (What kind of parent would they be?)

idk if i can see ryujin with kids, but in the chance you do have any, she would be such a cool mom, taking them to her studio just so they could hop around to music while she choreographed something, maybe she has a room for them to play and nap if necessary too, and if you have a boy, she would be his hero literally, he’ll always want to be like her and copy her every move.

Q = Quirk (Some random ability they have that’s beneficial in a relationship or a cute quirk they have that many don’t know about)

she’s such a good cuddler/can make people fall asleep so easily, the way she expertly runs her hands through your hair or back lulls you into a deep slumber almost instantly, the kisses she presses on your nose and forehead only helping the matter

R = Romantic (How romantic are they? What would they do to make you happy? Cliché or rather creative?)

ryujin is so romantic in general, she just loves to express how much she loves you and cares for you in more ways than just saying it. and the long-lasting smile on your lips when she susprises you is so worth it too, it can range from bringing home a dish of chocolate covered strawberries to setting up a bath with rose petals and candles, to just taking a drive around the city to a pretty place she heard about, talking softly about everything and nothing

S = Secrets (Do they have secrets they hide from their s/o? Or do they share everything?)

you pretty much share anything, honesty is very important for her and your relationship. plus she enjoys telling you even about the smallest details of her day

T = Thrill (Do they need to try out new things to spice up your relationship? Or do they prefer a certain routine?)

she doesn’t need to, ryujin is perfectly happy with your dynamic and so are you, but whenever the topic comes up she’s not opposed!

U = Unbearable (What habit do they have that’s unbearable? What habit do you have that they find unbearable)

EATING IN BED. i know y’all have seen that livestream of her eating tangerines in bed, sticky, juicy tangerines. so whenever she brings a snack or anything to eat to bed she’s expecting your side eye to what she responds promising to not make a mess and to clean it if she does.

and her, she hates your incredibly weird eating combinations, the fact that you will offer some to her to try too, she finds herself gagging just at the sight or smell and threatening to break up with you for laughing.

V = Videos (Do they take lots of videos or photos during your relationship?)

of course she does, like i said, the two of you enjoy scrapbooking, that means making your own scrapbook with your own photos taken by each other or strangers you asked on the street, writing down funny highlights of your dates to remember whenever you go through it. also, she has you as her background, it’s a funny yet endearing sight to see her flaunting the front of her phone to everyone so they would catch a glimpse of you as her wallpaper.

W = Wedding (What is your wedding like?)

so much fun, lots of dancing, kissing, and teasing, specially when it’s time to take your garter off ;)). but the most endearing moment is cutting the cake, it’s funny, nerve-wracking because everyone is looking at you, yet a beautiful memory you’ll hold on to forever as long as the photos capturing the moment.

X = eXtra (What is an interesting fact about them that they’ve only told you?)

maybe that she wants to have a farm at some point in her life

Y = Yearning (How do they cope when they’re missing you?)

she’ll call you, of course, talk to you, but ever since you made her a playlist, songs that reminded you of her, of the two of you, whenever she’s missing you she will listen to it, even if she knows the song letter by letter she will listen to all of them until the pain in her chest dissolves into something lighter. even when she’s sad and with you, she’ll play the songs and lay in your arms, sometimes crying with the soft murmur of your singing in her ear.

Z = ZZZ (What is it like sleeping with them? Do they like to cuddle or do they need space?)

i don’t think she moves at all lmao, like you will find every hair and muscle just the way you last saw it before closing your eyes, most of the time she likes cuddling, i feel like she is a bigger spoon type of person, but she will hide her face in your chest every once in a while to be able to go to sleep.

#ryujin blurb #ryujin headcanon #ryujin !#ryujin x reader #ryujin fluff #ryujin imagine #itzy imagine #itzy imagines #itzy fluff #alphabet #my stuff

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yutahoes · 3 years

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Sakura

(Part Seven)

One - Two - Three - Four - Five - Six - Seven

genre : Chaptered, Fluff,

pairing : childhood friends: soccer player! Nakamoto Yuta x single mom! Y/N

word count : 3.3k words

You’ll always be his Sakura.

@ailoveyuta @loona-4-eva @aiforyuu @2-3-t-i @cosmiclatte28 @url-lindo-sexy @nuoyipeach @aaasteroidsky @thisis-myname @yutazen01

Her smile that time in Osaka is still imprinted in Yuta’s mind that it haunts him even in his dreams. It was winter in their last year of their teens when Yuta begged Y/N’s mom if she could spend the holidays in Osaka with his family. Of course, his parents were also behind this and promised that they’ll take care of Y/N. And even if he’s just remembering it now, he still can’t believe that her mom actually allowed her to go to another country.

His parents quickly greeted her when she came to the airport, asking if she had trouble during the flight but she smiled at them answering them in fluent Japanese that made him proud. She seemed so natural talking to them, even calling them okaasan and otousan like they’re one family. “Yuta!” she called excitedly, arms wide open to hug him which he accepted. His parents were just smiling at him knowingly. “Bogoshipda.”

Who wouldn’t? The last time he saw her was the day she left for Chicago. No, the day before that. Although he and his mom sent them off, he refused to look at her that time. "I missed you too." He whispered that made her smile widely. Something changed about her. Is it because they never saw each other for years? Or because his memory of her is stuck in the last time they were together? Is it because they already grew up? Maybe it's because of Chicago.

His family had been welcoming to her and they were equally amazed that Y/N can understand and speak Japanese. Since it's just days before New Year, their house is full of people but they made her feel like she is a part of the family. "You should bring her to Osaka Castle." One of his aunts claimed that made Yuta nod.

"Why not bring her to Universal Studios?" Another asked and Y/N just nodded, looking excited. Yuta put his phone on top of the table. "Otousan, can you drive us to Hirakata Park tomorrow?" He asked which made everyone look at him.

Y/N was so surprised seeing a Cardcaptor Sakura exhibition that she squealed in excitement at the entrance making Yuta smile. This feels like the Y/N he knows. They kept on looking at the different artworks related to the anime she liked since she was young, even staying too long at some merchandise. "Should I buy that? Sakura is really cute."

Yuta chuckled. "You can't even eat that." That made her glare at him, pouting. But Yuta remembered that merchandise, even telling himself that he’ll save up to buy that for her birthday.

She was really happy to eat in a café that is inspired by the same anime. She kept on taking pictures saying that she'll show them to her mom. "I knew you'll love it here."

"Can I just live here?"

He laughed once again. "You can ask my parents to adopt you."

Y/N wrapped her arms on Yuta's arm that made him freeze. What's with the sudden skinship? "Shall I call you oniichan?"

He smiled at her then frowned. "No."

It was almost nighttime when they reached Dohtonbori. Tons of pictures were taken and she kept on running around, claiming that everything in Japan is pretty. "It's prettier when there are cherry blossoms. You should go back in spring." But honestly, he just wanted her to stay here until Spring. Or maybe for a long time.

Should he ask his parents to adopt her? But he doesn't want him to call her imouto.

The lights illuminating the whole area looked magical. Why does he like it more today than when he's out here with his parents? Why does the light look more lovely today? The cold breeze made him pull his oversized coat closer. Why is it so cold? Glancing at her, he realized that she may be cold as well. Does Chicago have a cold season like this?

Knowing that she's focused on looking at those little trinkets by the store, he went to another store to buy something. Her mom will kill him if she gets sick in this weather. Besides, it's going to be busier this time of the year. "Y/N." He called that made her look at him. He put on a white scarf around her neck, wrapping it nicely on her. "My Christmas gift."

She had to laugh at that, raising a snow globe. "And I was thinking of buying one for you." She turned her attention to the different snow globes on the shelf. "You should pick one, Yuta."

But he never looked at the snow globes. Instead, his focus was on her. The lights illuminate her, creating a picturesque background. The white snow falling gently on her, adding to the effect. He badly wanted to imprint that image in his mind. When did she become this pretty? When she turned to him, he lightly gasped. Why did he feel hot all of a sudden? Why can he hear his heart beating on his chest?

Y/N shook the snow globe with the Osaka castle inside then handed it to him. "I'll get you this, onii chan." It annoyed him. Why does she like using that word?

The whole week was full of preparations for the New Year and his relatives had supplied her with the rituals they must do. She helped in making mochi with his grandmother who seemed so fond of her. Even his grandfather, who is usually a scary man, smiles a lot because of her. She really fit well in his family. But not as his sister.

When the clock struck midnight, he realized what it was. She was playing some sparklers with his cousins, laughing along with them. Her eyes twinkling the same way they did when she was staring at those snow globes. Taeyong was right all along. He is in love with her.

Kareshi. It's a better term than oniisan. Something that he wanted her to call him right now. "Y/N, I…" But a ringtone stopped his words, someone was calling. "It must be your mom, you should pick up." The girl nodded, handing her sparkler to Yuta before heading inside the house.

God, what is wrong with him? Is he really going to confess to her? He must be out of his mind. Yuta just finished the stick of sparkler before heading inside to check on her. She was seated on the couch, smiling on her phone. "They are all so nice to me, eomma." She then smiled when she noticed Yuta. "We're going to the temple tomorrow with obaasan." Hatsumonde. It's a Japanese ritual that they had done since he was young and since she's here, his grandmother wanted her to experience visiting a shrine. "You want to talk to Yuta?"

The guy just shook his head, sitting next to her, but she pushed the phone to her which he reluctantly answered. "Eommeoni, annyeong." She sounded so happy talking to him on the phone but again his focus was on the door next to him who was playing the kendama, a Japanese ball and cup toy. "Please take care of Y/N." And even if she doesn't say those words, he knows he'll take care of her.

When she dropped the call, Yuta saw her phone wallpaper. A guy playing basketball. It looks like a photo taken. Is she dating someone? Did she mention anything about a guy in her letters? Is that why she's prettier? Is she in love?

The question was answered when they visited the shrine the next day. She is indeed prettier especially when she wore a kimono that his cousin let her borrow, little trinkets adored her hair. She looked like a native Japanese. A yome. But he shook his head. He can't be thinking of that.

They were getting their omikuji, him and her with another set of female and male cousins that are older than the two of them. When Y/N pulled her paper strip, his female cousin shook her head. "You'll probably get pregnant this year." She claimed that startled her. "Are you dating someone?" Y/N nodded.

"You two are already dating?" His male cousin asked, referring to her and Yuta. She shook her head saying that he's a schoolmate from Chicago. So he's really seeing the guy on her phone wallpaper. When Yuta opened his paper strip, his cousin just tapped his back. "You should have confessed earlier." But he just stared at the bad luck written on his paper.

His second regret. Why did it take a long time for him to realize these feelings?

It was Yuta's Summer Break when his parents gave him the airplane tickets to Chicago that surprised him. They had talked to Y/N and her mom that he's visiting. And although he doesn't want to go there, he was forced by his family. "You should at least tell her that you like her. Maybe it can change something."

The city was different and he felt really foreign, different than when he first came to Korea. "Yuta!" Y/N called, running to where he is and quickly hugging him. What is this girl doing? In front of all these people? "I skipped class to pick you up. Why can't you hug me?" He raised an eyebrow at her. Why is she so bold? Chicago is indeed different. Yeokshi Chicago.

He jokingly crushed her on his arms but she didn't laugh, which is odd. He felt her breathing on his neck, hot and hard. "I missed you, Yuta." It felt different. Maybe because they're in Chicago. He didn't pay that much attention to that especially when she introduced a guy named Johnny Seo. The person on her wallpaper. The guy she's dating.

Johnny is a really nice guy. He showed him what Chicago is while waiting for her to finish her classes. He made an effort to talk to him in Korean or English, sometimes in Japanese that he heard from her. He shared stories about her, the Y/N Yuta doesn't personally know. He knew what to order for her in coffee shops, even at restaurants. He speaks to her calmly, staring at her as if she's the only person who mattered in the world. And he knew, she's in the right place with Johnny.

It was Saturday when Johnny and Y/N brought him to The Bean. The weather was hot and there were a lot of people because of the weekend but Yuta didn't care. "You haven't been to Chicago if you didn’t visit this place." Johnny claimed that made the girl nod. They took tons of pictures, Y/N teasing that he needed to show it to his cousins.

Johnny offered to get them coffee, leaving the two of them in the park while still taking pictures. "Johnny is pretty nice." Yuta started that made her smile, nodding at him. "You never mentioned him in your letters."

"I don't know what to tell you." She answered quietly. "But I like him. So much." He wanted to stop her that moment, wanted her to not continue what she's saying or it will just hurt him. "He helped me a lot to quickly adapt here."

A bitter smile escaped his lips. The same way she helped him back in Korea. How dare she fall in love with another guy that way? But when Johnny came with their coffees at hand, he saw the twinkle in her eyes. The twinkle that made his heart flutter. She really does love Johnny. And who is he to take that twinkle away? Who is he to tell her what she can and can't do? He's just her friend. A very dear friend.

He drank his coffee watching as how the taller guy fixed her hair, smiling at her with a lot of love in his eyes. Bittersweet. That was what it was. It's hurtful yet romantic. And he can't believe that he will always remember Chicago with those feelings. Yeoksi Chicago.

Johnny loves Y/N. He's sure of that. And he honestly doesn't want to believe that it didn't work well with them. What really happened? Did she give up? Or is he the one who gave up? That was the question in his mind seeing Johnny in front of the two kids' school. He can still remember him but does Johnny even remember him?

Yuta can see the two kids going outside the gates and honestly, he was scared that they'll run to their dad. He shouldn't have come here today. Why did he even come here? "Daddy!" He heard Jae call running to his dad. Of course, he must have missed him so much that the younger guy even called him 'appa' last time. But he noticed Cherry stopping on her tracks.

She noticed him but he only smiled at her, planning to just go. He was about to enter his car when he heard the younger girl say, "Can I hang out with Yuta samchon?" That was when Johnny noticed him, Jae even waved at him excitedly. "He promised me that we'll go back to the library when he gets back from Spain." He did promise her. But her dad is here. Isn't she excited to see him again?

"Is it alright if Cherry goes with you?" Yuta nodded. He wanted to hang out with them anyways. "I'll just tell Y/N." Cherry just walked chicly to him, her eyes as dark as when he first met her. Why is she like this? Does she not like Johnny? Jae told Yuta that he wanted to hang out with his dad, even telling him to take care of his noona that he found so adorable.

Yuta bid farewell to the father-son, opening the backseat door for the younger girl. Cherry was just looking at her shoes when Yuta entered the car, starting the engine to drive her to the library she loved. "Samchon…" she called which made him look at her from the mirror of the car, humming as a response. "Can you buy me a cake today?"

It was a request he can't say no. This was the first time that Cherry asked him for something and he's somehow glad that it is just a simple thing. He parked in front of a pretty café, helping her get down from the car, and even opened the door for her. "You can order whatever you want." He urged, eyeing all the selections of different flavored cakes.

The girl pointed at a white cake with red cherries on top, making Yuta smile. A cherry cake. "Can you buy me the whole cake?" The guy just nodded. It's not bad to spoil her once in a while. He told the girl on the counter their order, handing him his card when she made another request, "Do you have candles?" Candles? Is it her birthday? Is that why Johnny is here in Korea?

He let the younger girl put candles in between the cherries of her cake. "Is it your birthday today?" He asked and she nodded casually that startled him. Why are they together? She should be with her parents. "Don't you want to share the cake with your brother?"

Cherry shook her head. "I always share everything with him. He and eomma never liked cherries anyways." He pursed his lips at that, she does hate cherries. Ironically, she named her firstborn with something that she didn't like. "And dad hates cherry." She was staring at the cake while saying those words in a hushed tone. Is she referring to the fruit or another thing? "Can you light it up, samchon?" Her eyes were moist, sparkling against the light, like she wanted to cry.

He held the top of her head, smiling. "Wait up. I'll just go get something." He said then stood up. "Stay here and wait for me. I won't be long." But she only stared at him in worry. Yuta handed her his phone, promising that he'll be back quickly. He crossed the street to get her some flowers then cursed himself for not knowing what color she wanted. Does she even like flowers?

To be safe, he followed the florist's advice in getting a white rose for 'his daughter'. There was a new expression on Cherry's face when he handed her the single white flower, an emotion he hasn't seen from her before. "Girls should receive at least a flower on their birthday." He reasoned out then lit up all the candles on the cake. She whispered something on herself as a wish before blowing the candles one at a time.

Yuta took away the candles then started slicing the cake. He placed one slice on Cherry's plate, even topping it with cherries on top. It was the younger girl who gave him his slice of the vanilla cake. "Do you want to do anything else? Ice skating?"

"Can we just go ice skating with eomma and Jae some time?" He nodded. She always thinks about them. "I'll just finish the book in the library today."

It is her birthday yet she's silently reading a suspense book while seated on a bean couch. Yuta just bought her some snacks and got a book to read so he wouldn't get bored. He would smile at her little gasps and remembered how Y/N would be like that while reading manga. Cherry is indeed a splitting image of her. It's crazy.

"Samchon," Cherry called, closing the hardbound book she was reading earlier. Is she done? That fast? "When you were young, what do you want to be when you grow up?"

He chuckled at that question. She is still a kid. "I want to be a soccer player."

"How about mom?"

Yuta glanced at her. "She wanted to be an illustrator." He remembered how good her drawings are and even pursue that passion until her college years. "But you know, your mom suddenly wrote to me one day and said that she wanted to be a mom."

"Can dreams change?" Cherry asked innocently. There's a certain air of maturity in the little girl that Yuta always forgets that she's just a kid. Now, she looks like a little girl who wonders about life.

Yuta nodded at the question. "What do you want to be when you grow up, Cherry?"

"A detective." That's a nice dream. Maybe that's why she likes reading all these Agatha Christie books. "When I become a detective, I will help children find their dads." That sparked his curiosity. What? "I wanted to find my dad."

"Johnny is your dad."

"He's not." She exclaimed which made Yuta wide-eyed. "Eomma got pregnant with me even before she married dad. She had Jae because she wanted to save her and dad's marriage." That was some wild accusations from a child.

Yet, it seemed rather logical.

It was a mystery to him why Johnny and Y/N broke up when he saw how much they liked each other. They had two children, isn't that enough reason to stay together? He remembered all the conversations with Cherry about her dad, how sad her reaction is, and how quiet her voice is when talking about him. The image of the younger girl who looked awkward seeing her dad flashed on his mind. She's wary of him. Not scared, not angry. She just doesn't look like someone who knew what she should do with her dad. She looked like she doesn't belong.

But then again, maybe it's just her.

Maybe he can help her. He can probably prove that Johnny is her dad. "Cherry, how old are you?"

"Eight."

'Seven years, turning eight' He can hear Y/N's voice in his mind saying those words. The same age as Cherry. The last time they saw each other was eight years. In Chicago. After that night.

"Samchon, do you know who my real dad is?"

Yuta gulped. He probably knows.

Fuck, he might just be Cherry's dad.

🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸

Eight

#yuta fluff #yuta nakamoto fluff #yuta #yuta nakamoto #nct fluff #yuta chaptered #nakamoto yuta chaptered #nakamoto yuta fluff

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tobesensation-9 · 4 years

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A Little Help: Rowoon x Reader

Genre: Smut (Mentions of partial nudity and mutual masturbation over the phone)

In attempt to just edit something on the story I accidently delelted it. This was in the works and also requested, hope you enjoy!

Many days this week you’ve been waking up hot and bothered. Like sweating, forehead, and chest glistening. Usually, dreams were a blur for you, choppy images, and then blackness. But these last few days, your dreams couldn’t have been more vivid. Flashes of flesh against flesh, moans, and grunts in harmony. You smacked a hand against your head. You were desperate and in need of...... something you were embarrassed to admit to yourself, well....for some dick. You snickered at the way you thought about it. But you just nodded to yourself, you weren’t kidding, you totally were. But not just anyone’s dick, for his. Your alarm goes off, signaling that it was time for you to get ready for work. You press stop and look at the wallpaper of the person whom you want so badly. Rowoon is a hoodie, a pair of blue jeans, and some converse looking off at a flower garden, so majestically as he does so well. You smile to yourself start to head to your bathroom. You stomach somersaults when you think about the events of that night, and how he ended the night fucking you so good from behind that he had you seeing stars. He was so dangerous in how he can just switch sides so well and hide them even better. You walk into work with all the usual coffee orders for your mentors at the magazine publishing company you worked at. They greet you fondly as you give them your coffee orders. Although you were an intern, they treated you as an equal and you were forever grateful for that. You walk to the office of your mentor, also the editor-in-chief, Larissa. “Good Morning gorgeous! Honey, why do you so flushed?” “Good Morning, oh am I really?” You hand her coffee and instinctively feel your cheeks, the heat too much to bear. “What? You got lucky last night honey?” Your boss winks at you and you immediately deny. “No-no-no. Though, I wish I did.” “Oh, so you must have but only in your dreams?” “Sadly.” “Call your boyfriend. I know that they're not doing many promotions anymore so he may have time to see you.” “I don’t know. He may be busy with photoshoots and or filming for a new show. He usually contacts me when he isn’t and he hasn’t these last couple weeks. Also with the pandemic, it made it harder than before.” “Well,” she sits some papers down and walks closer to your own personal desk on the other side of the office, “you two can always, well you know.” She looks at you with a mischievous smirk, raising her eyebrows. “No Mrs. Larissa I’m afraid I don’t,” you snicker, your nerves getting the best of you. You had an idea what she was hinting at but you just wanted to make sure and not assume and be wrong. “I’m sure there are other things besides that magic rod of his that has you going crazy. And stop calling me Mrs. it makes me feel old.” “Yeah, sure but what exactly are you getting at Mrs-” you looks at you wide-eyed before you caught yourself, “Larissa?” “I mean, I know for you to be with that fine specimen of man, there are many things that turn you on when you think of him. I bet his voice being the most promising thing.” So you were thinking the same thing. “Are you suggesting we have phone sex?” “Well not exactly. Just talk nice and dirty to each other, not as if you were but you know. Give each other some motivation, some help. I’m sure he’s feeling the same way as you. You two need something to hold on to at this time. Especially with everything that’s happening.” You actually weren’t opposed to this idea. You were embarrassed that you were talking about this with your boss so early in the morning. “I might give it a try. I’ll let you know how it goes.” “Or you could write about it hon, this can be your first project. Just let me know how it goes and if you're up for it.” You really loved working at this place, you couldn't imagine working anywhere else. Now you just had to imagine how this phone call would go. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Little did you know Seokwoo was feeling the same way. Even with promotions for their new comeback coming to an end, he still had so many photoshoots. And the complications with filming his new drama during the pandemic wasn’t easy either. He wanted to contact you, but he was either busy with a schedule or was too tired. After a photoshoot, he was finally allowed to have some time himself. Lucky for him no one was at the dorms this right now. After a show he figured he’d call you, you’d be off of work around this time. Walking out the bathroom in shorts and a t-shirt, he hears his phone ring. He dries his hair and wipes the water from his ears while looking at his phone. To his delight, it was you. “Oh, hey. I was just about to call you.” “Really?” There was something he noticed about your tone. “Is something wrong?” “No no. I’m fine. How was your day? I- really missed you.” He smiles. “I missed you too, jagi. Just a photoshoot today. It ended pretty early.” Your brain went blank. You wanted to try to rear the conversation to hot and steamy but you didn’t how. “Jagi, are you sure there’s nothing wrong? You called but your pretty quiet.” “I’ve.....I’ve been craving you a lot...lately.” Crave? Did she mean that the way he thought you did? “Crave?” “Yeah I...I’ve been dreaming a lot lately about......well you know. I miss your touch.” On the other end of the line, your voice sounded so weak, feeble. He knew what you were trying to say and that it took a lot for you to say. “Y/n.” “Yeah.” “I know exactly how you feel. Longer than you know.” Strangely you're starting to get turned on, just by the tone of his voice. “Was that weird? I-I’m sorry.” He nervously laughs. “No!-” His laughing stops. “I mean no, I actually wanted to try something. Give each other a little help, over the phone I mean.” He was quiet for a beat, “Oh....uh okay. Not gonna deny, you saying you craved me started to turn me on.” You started to feel a heaviness in your core, tickling warmth between your thighs. “You just got out the shower right?” You start to rub yourself over your underwear. “Yeah. You dreamt about us in the shower?” “One of the places I dreamt of this week.” He starts to slowly palm himself. He sighs, “God, I wish you were here.” “Imagine I am. What am I doing?” He starts to palm himself more firmly now, “Teasing me over my shorts, like how you always do.” “I’m not in the mood to tease today. Take them off.” He immediately obeys, following with you hear shifting through the phone. “What are you wearing?” he asks hoping that you aren't wearing a thing. “One of your t-shirts and my favorite underwear.” “Take them off. The underwear.” You oblige. You start to hear a huskiness to his deep voice that makes you wanna cum right then. “Fuck...babe your voice is so hot through the phone. I’m so wet.” He lets a breathy moan and pulls himself out of his underwear. He slowly starts to stroke himself. “I miss how your mouth feels. You choking on my cock.” “Yeah. Like how I used to you?” Your comment earns you a groan which makes you slip in a finger into your slick. The two of you start to talk wreckless to each other, it was heaven. “You fingering yourself babe?” “Yeah, imagining you stretching me out.” “Fuck, yeah, with your tight little pussy. Get three in there.” You gradually stretch yourself more, your moan indicating so. When all three are in your moans aren't as strained. “Shit, babe. I wish it were you.” By your moans you pick your pace, he does the same. The two of you go on like this for a few minutes, but you start to feel your orgasm building. “Damn, babe I’m close.” “Yeah?” “Yeah. Ahhh, fuck.” From your moans, he starts to feel on edge too. “Jagi you sound so hot like that. You're gonna make cum.” At each other's words you set each other off, you cumming, and him following soon behind. The two moan in harmony, just like in your dreams. You hear a sigh on the other end, followed by a giggle. “What are you laughing at?” You can't help but giggle too. “I never thought of us as a couple to do this stuff.” “Funny, my boss actually gave me an idea.” “Really?” this makes him laugh harder. “Yeah. I’m totally serious.” “Well, she just made tonight interesting. Tell her thanks and ask her if she has any more tips and ideas for us when we finally see each other again.”

#sf9 #sf9 requests #sf9 smut #Rowoon #rowoon x reader #rowoon smut #Youngbin #Inseong #Jaeyoon #Dawon #Zuho #Taeyang #Hwiyoung #Chani

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athina-blaine · 4 years

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MoMM Update! - What to heck?

Hello, everyone! Unfortunately, Chapter 2 is still under works– the hiatus we mentioned back in our first update post has arrived and MoMM has to take a bit of a backseat for now. I was definitely overzealous in flinging around posting dates the way I did, and I apologize for that; I’d hate to have inflicted any unnecessary disappointment. I promise to practice more reservation in the future!

In the meantime, I’ve decided to go ahead and post the first half of the chapter under this cut– 6k words, 17 pages, I got it all right here for ya. [pats top of post]

Enjoy!

THE MONSTER OF MAGNUS MANOR

CHAPTER 2

THE ESTATE

(Chapter 1 here!)

Martin’s dreams were murky things, cut to the clop of fading hoofbeats and a pair of frightened eyes– eyes that kept locking with his own as the world faded in and out. At some point they’d manifested fully into a man– he was saying something, a string of urgent, unintelligible words that blistered the air around them.

“–tay with me, don’t– no, no, no, no–”

Martin’s vision greyed out before he could make out the rest.

When he resurfaced, he was lying in a … a bed? Was … this the castle infirmary–? No, he didn’t think even Lord Barclay’s mattress was this comfortable. And the rock slab cots lining the servants’ infirmary didn’t have four poster canopies, either …

Strange dream. Everything wobbled, and grew dark again.

And then he was blinking awake. The bed and its canopy were still there, as lavish as they’d been in his dream.

“Are you awake properly, this time?”

The unfamiliar voice had Martin lurching upright. Pain zinged through his skull; he groaned, pressing a hand to one eye.

“I don’t know,” he breathed. “I-I guess so?”

The man sitting beside him let out a slow breath, some of the stiffness unwinding from his posture. “You’ve had a few false starts,” he explained. “Understandable, given your head injury.”

Head injury. The events from earlier came rushing back to him– Martin’s vision was still swimming, but he recognised this man, or the colour of his eyes, at least. They were the same shade of brown as the mysterious figure from the fog. He’d since pulled back the hood of his cloak, revealing dark skin marred with pockmarks on one side of his fine-boned face. His hair had been tied up in a silvering bird’s nest of a bun, and a few thin strands had fallen to brush the shoulders of a richly embroidered vest.

Martin tallied it all up: posh manner, fine clothes, the thin, borderline regal cut of his face. Despite the incongruity of his scars and disheveled hair, the facts pointed to one thing– this had to be the lord of that mysterious estate.

A mysterious estate he was now inside, with an injury that had stars dancing before his eyes. “How–” Martin started, then paused to steady his breathing. “How long was I out?”

“Not long.” The man pulled an ornate pocket watch from his vest pocket, squinting. “It’s about five o’clock.”

“In the afternoon?”

“Does it look like five o’clock in the morning to you?” the man demanded, gesturing to the window. He was right; a weak orange sunset had begun staining the sky, casting dark shadows from the treeline over the estate’s grounds.

“No.” The word had been torn from Martin’s mouth with a burst of horror. He scrambled for the sheets, startling a noise from his host.

“What on earth do you think you’re doing?”

Martin wasn’t listening; the image of Lord Barclay’s cold eyes as he told him, in unequivocal terms, that he was sacked had sent a low, buzzing static through his ears. “I’m sorry, thank you for taking me in, but I need t– I need to–” He had to get back– for his mum, if nothing else. Oh, God, if he lost this job now …

“What you need is to lie back down.” Martin’s bare foot had scarcely touched the floor before the man rose to his feet, thrusting a hand against his chest. “Didn’t you hear what I said? You’ve been concussed.”

Martin was unceremoniously shoved back down. He could’ve fought back– the stranger’s wrists were stick-thin where they stuck out past the sleeves of his tunic, and Martin wasn’t exactly small– but the sudden motion sent a wave of dizziness crashing over him, and Martin couldn’t summon the strength for it.

“Let me make one thing perfectly clear,” the man said, eyes fierce. “In your current state, you’ll collapse before you ever make it out of this forest. Is that what you want?”

The words hung in the air between them. Martin swallowed, shaking his head.

“Then lie down.”

Cowed, Martin sank back into the mattress. Once it was clear he wasn’t struggling, the man relaxed, withdrawing his hand from Martin’s chest.

“Thank you,” he said, sitting back down. Then his shoulders sagged. “I … apologise. I’m sure you have somewhere important to be, and you’ve been hurt as a direct result of my actions. Please believe me when I say this was not my intention.”

A heavy note of guilt rang through his voice, and Martin’s chest panged with instinctive sympathy. “I-it’s fine. It was just an accident.”

If anything, the grim set of his host’s mouth worsened. “I should also warn you– your horse ran off. I tried looking for her after bringing you here, but she doesn’t appear to be in the area.”

Oh God, Phillipa. “… she’s resourceful,” Martin said, but it was much weaker this time. “I wouldn’t be surprised if she’s found her way back home already.“

The stranger kept his gaze trained on his hands. “ … I– yes, of course. I’m sure you have nothing to worry about.” Abruptly, he stood once more. “I assume you’re hungry? Now that you’re awake, I can bring you something to eat.”

Martin jumped. “Oh, uh.” It would have been a full day since he’d last eaten, by now. He wasn’t sure he’d be able to keep anything down. Based on the strange intensity in the man’s eyes, though, only one correct answer existed. “Y-yes, I– um, thank you. Actually some– some tea would be nice?”

A single, sharp nod was his only response; the man turned on his heel, making a beeline for the door.

Martin held out a hand before he could stop himself. “Wait– wait.”

The man turned, arching one brow, and heat washed over Martin’s face. He hadn’t actually had anything important to say, but they hadn’t even exchanged names.

“Sorry, I just … wanted to thank you. For– for taking me in.” He cleared his throat. “My name is Martin, by the way. Martin Blackwood.”

“A … pleasure to make your acquaintance, Mister Blackwood.”

Martin flushed. "Oh– just Martin is fine. Um … c-can I ask for your name?”

Silence stretched taffy-thin between them as his host studied him, expression unreadable. Martin’s breath stilled in his lungs– was he being measured up? Found wanting somehow? He’d only asked for a name–

“Jon.”

Martin stiffened, but with a snap of his cloak, the man vanished, closing the door behind him.

Jon.

Martin wasn’t sure what he’d been expecting, but it hadn’t been that. Jon. It was so … common. Approachable, for such an unapproachable man. Perhaps it was a family name.

Musings about Jon’s name could only distract him for so long, however, with his worst case scenario waiting for him back in the real world. Barclay would make him beg if he wanted to continue working in the castle, especially after last night’s disaster.

Martin dropped his head in his hands. He was as good as sacked.

Distraction. He needed a good distraction. Anything to take his mind off agonising– not like he could fix anything confined to a bed by a stranger.

Lifting his head, he took a moment to peer around the room. It was bigger than the servants’ dormitory he shared with the others back at Barclay’s castle. To his right was an old, carved wardrobe; the desk and chair beside it had been made out of smooth mahogany. Paintings, their colours dulled by time, were hanging lopsided on some of the walls– a stark contrast to the faded wallpaper beneath them. Settled over it all was a fine layer of dust; only the chair, and the bed Martin was lying in, had been cleared of it.

Obvious disuse aside, even Lord Barclay’s accommodations weren’t this opulent. An unexpected twinge of guilt shot through Martin’s chest, as if he was doing something wrong. Stealing comfort that didn’t belong to him.

By the time Jon came back, the sunset had shifted from orange to a slow-burning red that dappled the sky. Tucked in the crook of his elbow was an unidentifiable bolt of cloth, and in his hands, a dinner tray. A silver dinner tray. “I apologise for the simplicity of the meal,” Jon said. “It’s … been some time since I’ve had the opportunity to cook.”

Had … was Jon implying that he, the lord of this house, had cooked for Martin? Martin swallowed, tearing his gaze from Jon back to the tray. Why wouldn’t the kitchen staff be making his meals?

Jon didn’t hand him the tray so much as he slid it into Martin’s lap; on it was a bowl of boiled vegetables, and next to that, a steaming cup of tea. Simple, yes, but Martin was grateful nonetheless.

“Thank you, really,” said Martin, entirely too genuine. Under the attentive eyes of his host, he shovelled a spoonful of turnip and carrot into his mouth, and started to chew. He stopped.

Jon leaned forward, poised. “How i– er, that is, I hope it’s to your satisfaction.”

Martin steeled himself and kept chewing, scrambling for a neutral expression. While the outside of the vegetables were soggy, their insides crunched against his molars, sending shudders down his spine. Underboiled, his mind supplied helpfully.

It was, perhaps, one of the worst meals he’d eaten in his life.

“It’s great,” he lied, smiling past the curdling in his stomach. Jon had made this himself, and Martin was going to die before he willingly insulted a lord to his face.

Jon released a quiet breath. “That’s … good.” He unwound the cloth draped over his forearm; it was a nightshirt and cap, made of fabric that could’ve been water for how it piled onto the sheets. “These are for you to wear to bed. You can find something to change into tomorrow in the wardrobe. Please inform me if there are any that don’t fit.” He winced. “And you’ll have to excuse me if you find anything that’s been chewed through. It’s impossible, keeping the moths out this time of year.”

“Tha– thank you?”

“You, ah,” Jon hesitated, before clearing his throat. “Seeing you’re here because of me, you’re welcome to stay until you’ve made a full recovery.” His voice grew guarded. “My only stipulation is that you remain in your rooms at night.”

Martin paused.

It wasn’t that unusual of a request– Martin was a stranger, of course Jon didn’t want him wandering about at night. No, what snagged Martin’s attention was the faint, nervous hitch of his shoulders as he said it.

“O-of course.” Martin’s throat bobbed. “Is it– can I ask why?”

Jon’s eyes narrowed. "I don’t see how that’s any of your business.”

Oh, hell. “Sorry, sorry, you’re right. I-it’s just, I don’t know …” kind of strange? But the impatient twist of Jon’s mouth stopped him cold.

The silence dragged, then Jon crossed his arms. “I have a dog.”

“A … dog?”

“Yes. Big, vicious thing. He … patrols the manor at night– and he’s not partial to strangers.”

Oh. Well, that … that made sense, didn’t it? Still odd, though– Barclay had a whole team of hunting dogs, and none of them were allowed to wander the grounds without supervision. They weren’t pets, and they certainly weren’t guards. It appeared this one was, though.

“What’s his name?” Martin asked, before he could think better of it.

“What?”

“The dog.” Martin held up his hands in apology. “Sorry, it’s just, I love dogs. My neighbors had one when I was a kid. Ol’ Frankie.”

Jon’s eyes narrowed even further. “John.”

“… John.”

“Yes.”

“John … the dog?”

“Yes, that’s correct.”

“You named the dog after yourself?”

The look Jon shot him was equal parts baffled and incredulous, as if he were ludicrous for asking. “I came into possession of the dog after it received its name. And, besides, it’s John, spelled with an H.”

“I … see.” Martin didn’t see. “Obviously.” It had not been obvious.

Jon glowered, daring him to continue, then reached into his pocket. “One last thing. I noticed … well, here.” With an oddly stiff motion, he held out a small glass jar of salve. “For your hands. It would be irresponsible of me, as your host, to let them ulcerate unchecked.”

Startled, Martin glanced down at his hands– they were still covered in blisters from scrubbing last night’s mountain of dishes. He’d forgotten about them in all the chaos.

“Th-thanks,” he said, accepting the jar.

Clearing his throat, Jon stepped back. “I’ll let you finish your meal. You can expect me tomorrow morning with breakfast.” One hand on the door, he hesitated, then added in a soft undertone, “Get some rest.”

Jon was gone before Martin could answer. He was alone once again.

Unscrewing the lid of the jar, Martin gave the ointment an experimental sniff– honey and almonds. He scooped out a dollop and rubbed it into the damaged skin of his hands, sighing as it cooled the sting of his blisters. Astonishing, that Jon had noticed at all– Martin was so used to it, he would have left them to rot on his own.

He finished his dinner, half out of pragmaticism, half because he didn’t want to risk insulting his host. At least the tea was good.

Tray set aside, Martin began unbuttoning his dress shirt. What an unusual sight he must have made, passed out on the ground in formal wear. The clothes Jon had provided were silky against his skin, marred only by the must of disuse– still a luxury for a person with Martin’s background.

It wasn’t enough to distract him from the cold knot of trepidation that twisted inside his stomach. But Jon had been right; even if he had known the way, he would never make it back in his current state, especially without Phillipa.

At the very least, things couldn’t get much worse. There was solace in that.

Martin settled back against the pillows. With so many thoughts racing through his head, sleep should’ve been impossible– but the moment he closed his eyes, the rest of the world slipped away.

“Here you are!” Martin’s eyes flew open as Charles dropped the tray into his arms. Its contents had been obscured by a covering; Martin couldn’t make heads or tails of what was inside, but whatever it was, it was heavy enough that he buckled under its weight.

Charles winked. “Better you than me, right?”

“R-right.”

“Well, go on then. He’s hungry!”

Pulse pounding in his ears, Martin scurried into the dark hallway. None of the candles had been lit, but he knew the way by heart. His arm shook under the weight of the tray– carrying it with both hands would’ve been easier, but that wasn’t proper. And Lord Barclay was so particular about being proper …

The grand door leading into the dining hall drew closer, and a coil of apprehension burrowed into Martin’s gut. An unusual smell had started emitting from the platter– sweet and gamey, meat mixed with sugar glaze. His feet moved, relentless, and with every step, that sinking pit of dread at the core of him grew heavier.

He opened the door. The dining hall was empty, save for where Barclay sat at the head of the table. A single lit candle shone down on the dozens of empty plates surrounding him. Barclay wiped his mouth with a pristine napkin, and waved Martin forward.

Martin’s hands were trembling. He placed the tray on the table in front of Barclay, in between the scattered, stained plates. At his Lord’s signal, he removed the covering with as much flourish as he could.

It was empty.

The hairs on the back of Martin’s neck stood on end. Run, his instincts screamed. Get away, now!

Barclay looked up at him, green eyes glittering dangerously. “Well?”

Martin started– at some point he’d been lowered into a chair. In ginger increments, he leaned over until his head was resting against the cool metal plate, each shuddering breath fogging its silver coating. Barclay reached for his utensils; Martin squeezed his eyes shut, praying that, for once, Barclay wouldn’t start with–

“Eyes open.”

Swallowing, Martin obediently pried them back open. The fork hovered out-of-focus, brushing his eyelashes.

Somewhere beyond Barclay’s hall, a voice brushed against the edges of his hearing.

“–Hello?”

The fork plunged down–

Martin jolted awake, his hair drenched in sweat. Sunlight was pouring in through the window, illuminating swathes of dust motes floating through each beam. It must have been around mid-morning. Reflexive panic welled in the back of his throat (late, oh God, he was so incredibly late) before the events of yesterday came back to him. The panic slipped away, dulled with leaden resignation.

Sleeping in was nice, at least; when was the last time he’d been this indulgent? Giving in to the mattress’ siren’s call was tempting– he could have slept longer, waited until Jon came to wake him up. But while the dreams’ contents had slipped away faster than he could recall, their weight sat heavy on the back of his tongue. He wasn’t particularly interested in returning.

Taking a chance, he tossed aside his blanket and slid onto his feet. His heart lifted– had he recovered enough to make it back to the castle?

The world spun on its axis, and Martin caught himself against the wooden bed poster before he collapsed.

Ah. As if he could be so lucky.

With one hand against the wall for support, Martin shuffled his way over to the wardrobe. The hinges creaked as he opened it– Lord, everything here needed a good cleaning. He’d have been tanned for letting a room fall into this much disrepair on Griffiths’ watch. Hopefully, the clothes would be in better–

Martin’s mind blanked. The clothes were indeed in better shape, but the options inside were … far more expensive than he was used to wearing. Was Jon not worried about Martin ruining them? Although they must’ve belonged to someone else– these were all too big for Jon. Whoever they belonged to, Martin prayed they wouldn’t mind him wearing their clothes.

He selected the plainest tunic and trousers he could find among the ornate, embroidered lot. None of them had moth holes, at least; Jon would be happy to hear that.

Speaking of his mysterious host …

As soon as he was confident he could walk without falling over, Martin opened the door to the hallway, glancing out into the hall. No dog; that was a good sign. Jon had mentioned bringing breakfast– the smartest idea was for Martin to wait inside his room, but his curiosity was burning. What did the estate of such an eccentric lord look like, anyway?

Surely he could risk a quick look around before Jon arrived.

Martin closed the door behind him with a gentle click, eyes roving over the hallway.

It appeared that the estate of a lord like Jon looked incredibly dusty.

Martin dragged an experimental finger over the surface of a nearby windowpane; it came back smeared with grime. Griffiths would’ve died on the spot– what on earth was Jon’s staff doing? Taking advantage of Jon’s generosity and shirking their responsibilities?

He picked a direction at random and began to walk, keeping one eye peeled for someone who could point him in a useful direction. This section of the manor appeared to have been functionally abandoned, though; perhaps Jon had wanted to ensure Martin’s privacy, although that seemed like an unnecessary effort.

By the time he reached what must have been the grand staircase of a foyer, he still hadn’t encountered another living being. Martin faltered, eyes grazing over the crusted windows, before dipping to linger on an old, broken gramophone at the bottom floor.

Where was everybody?

He continued trailing through the manor, more apprehensive now. Each step brought with it the sense he was a misplaced ghost; alone and drifting, untethered from reality. The layout of the hallways had a labyrinthian element to their design– a wise man would have turned back at risk of becoming lost, but …

It was as if someone had wrapped a string around his joints, tugging his feet forward. Martin couldn’t have turned back even if he’d wanted to.

His footsteps echoed through the empty corridors, crescendoing until they threatened to drive knives into his eardrums. No other noise penetrated the corridors; even the milky light filtering through the manor’s windows couldn’t reach him. The outside world had been choked off, as effectively as it had in the fog.

Panic swelled inside his lungs. Was there really nobody here? In a desperate bid, Martin threw open the first door to his left, hoping someone, anyone, would be on the other side.

Instead, he found the library.

Stumbling backwards, his jaw went slack.

Martin had only seen two libraries in his life: the small, tattered bookshelf in the back of his mother’s church, and Lord Barclay’s personal collection– although the servants couldn’t make any selections for themselves. An entire room full of books, Martin had assumed it was among the largest collections of its kind.

He’d been wrong.

What stood before of him now were two stories worth of wall-to-wall bookshelves, brimming with texts and tomes in exquisite leather bindings. The scent of old parchment tickled Martin’s nose, sending him back to that dusty corner of the church, escaping through tattered parables and hymns.

Entranced, Martin stepped into the enormous room, leaving the door hanging open behind him. Giddy compulsion had him plucking out the first book he laid eyes on. A cookbook; although the language inside was unfamiliar, every page had been filled with mouthwatering illustrations. He selected another book at random: this time, a book of astronomy. And after that, a love story. Martin fought the urge to laugh, breathless. Just how many different books did Jon have?

Tucking all three in the crook of his arm, he continued down the aisle, reverent fingers brushing over each spine as he passed. A vast majority of them had been left untouched; preserved, perhaps, to maintain the appearance of esteem. That was the only reason Barclay ever added to his works. But occasionally, he’d come across a book with frayed pages, its spine threadbare.

Not mishandled, though. None of the pages had been dogeared, or the bindings broken. No, these carried the air of a book well-loved, read so many times over the years they’d been worn down to the glue. Martin took those with him as well, adding them to the growing collection in his arms.

When the first throbs of a sharp ache began pulsing at the back of his head, Martin ignored it. He couldn’t just leave, not with so much begging for his attention. When would he ever come across an opportunity to browse through a collection like this again? No, he had to make the most of it, while he still could.

But as Martin reached the far corner of the library, he slowed. A door was tucked away here, in a corner where no sunlight reached. It was nondescript, out of place in its simplicity– and yet, something about it drew Martin closer. Cool air seeped from between the door’s cracks, beckoning his curiosity.

His fingers grazed the brass handle–

“Don’t touch that.”

Martin yelped, books crashing to the ground.

Jon was standing at the end of the aisle with eyes like chips of ice. Heat bloomed across Martin’s face. This hadn’t been how he’d planned to encounter his host again: caught like a child sneaking sweets from the pantry.

“Sorry,” he stammered, scrambling to scoop up the fallen books. God, he’d dropped them. “I-I wasn’t– I didn’t mean to–”

“How many times do I have to say the word concussed before it sinks in?” With a sigh, Jon bent over to pick up the remaining books, depositing them on a random bookshelf before swiping the rest from Martin’s hands. Martin flinched, and the lines around Jon’s mouth deepened. "You’re in no condition to be wandering, let alone nosing around into places you shouldn’t.”

“I– I wasn’t trying to, to snoop or anything–”

“Really.” Jon shot a cool, pointed glance at the door. The flush crawled down to Martin’s neck, prickling in time with his erratic pulse.

“Sorry,” he said again, lamely. “I really didn’t mean to– I-I was just … curious.”

“Curious. Of course.” With a sigh, Jon dropped the remaining books into another untidy stack, clapping dust off his hands. “I’ll show you back to your rooms– breakfast is waiting for you.”

Jon shouldered his way back out of the aisle, leaving Martin no choice but to follow. He was too embarrassed to protest even if he wanted to, but– his eyes lingered on the stack of books as they passed, mournful. It would have been nice to read at least one.

Jon urged him back into bed as soon as they reached Martin’s rooms, then turned to the breakfast tray he’d left on the desk. Martin fought down the growing dread at what Jon could have possibly prepared for this morning– but when Jon placed the tray on the bed, he breathed a sigh of relief.

Bread, butter, and a bowl of chestnuts. Absolutely no risk of anything overboiled here. And the bread was fresh, too– delicate wisps of steam rose to curl in the dusty air. Had Jon made this himself as well? It had come out better than the first meal, that was certain.

“Thank you,” Martin mumbled, picking up the bread knife to smear butter over a slice.

Jon’s frosty expression didn’t change. "Why in the world did– I can’t imagine what possessed you to roam around this morning. Do you have any idea what I experienced when I found you gone?”

A spasm of guilt tangled in Martin’s gut. “S-sorry. I just … wanted to look around, a little.”

“There’s nothing worth looking at. This place may as well be a mausoleum.”

Martin’s head whipped up. "You can’t mean that.”

A wry silence.

“Seriously? But your– your library is amazing! I’ve honestly never seen anything like it.”

“Th– the library?” Some of the severity in Jon’s expression vanished; he blinked, opening and closing his mouth. “ … Oh. Well, thank you, I suppose. But I’m, ah … I’m not the owner of that collection.” A shy, almost pleased note crept into his voice. “I did help retrieve a few of the rarer tomes, however. ”

Slice of bread halfway to his mouth, Martin paused. “You … but I thought …?”

One arched brow crept toward Jon’s hairline. “You thought … ?”

“I’m sorry, but– aren’t you the lord of this place?”

“No.”

Martin took a moment to process this sudden collapse of his mental image for Jon. “But then who … why are you …?”

For someone so young, Jon had far too much stress lining his face. “It’s … complicated. You could say I inherited this place from its previous owner.”

“Your father?”

“No,” Jon said, blanching. Then, without warning, he pitched forward. “I’ve been wondering if you’ll entertain a question from me.”

Martin jolted, taken aback by the sudden shift in conversation. “Y-yes?”

Jon smoothed a hand over one of his cuffs. “You were dressed too nicely to be working in someplace like a smithy. But your hands … I assume you’re a labourer of some kind?”

“Oh.” Flustered, Martin set down the piece of bread. Why would Jon want to know a mundane thing like that? “I’m, um, I’m a server in Lord Barclay’s estate, actually.”

“Barclay?”

“Yes, Lord Barclay. Lord Frederick Barclay?” Jon was still frowning. “Your Lord. Your Lord, if you live in this region.”

“You really expect me to know the name of every noble that goes parading themselves around these parts like an arsehole?”

“I-I … suppose not?” Martin didn’t understand how Jon couldn’t know, though. What about his taxes? “H-how about you?”

“Pardon?”

“Well, you said the library wasn’t yours, right? And … you said you’re not the lord of the estate, yeah?”

“In a legal sense, no.”

Well that was an interesting answer, but Martin was learning not to ask for elaboration. “So, what do you … do?”

Jon scowled. “I don’t see why it matters.”

“S-sorry.”

“You apologise a great deal, you’re aware of this?”

“S–” Martin bit it back just in time, and Jon blew out a haggard, long-suffering sigh.

“But I suppose it’s only a fair trade. If you really must know, I was – am, I suppose – the Head Archivist of this estate.”

Martin’s brows flew up– Head Archivist? That had to be rather prestigious. Did Barclay have a similar role anywhere present in his staff? The only thing Martin could think of that compared was … “So, like a librarian?”

“Not like a librarian.” But Jon’s mouth twitched. “I suppose there is some overlap. It was more than just filing books and keeping things tidy, though. We were also researchers.”

Martin perked up. “We?”

“… Yes. I … I did have a team working alongside me, previously. We researched unusual encounters, on behalf of our patron.”

“What kind of unusual encounters?” Fascinated, Martin leaned forward. “You mean like, like love affairs?”

“Nothing as salacious as that.” A slight smile broke out across his lips. “Although there– there was one time … ”

He stilled, trailing off. The fragile warmth that had been growing behind his eyes shuttered.

“Although … ?” Martin prompted after a beat.

Jon’s expression could’ve been carved from stone. He said nothing, shoulders hunched under some unseen burden.

A suspicion had been brewing in the back of Martin’s mind since his crawl through the manor’s hallways, and now, with Jon coiled tense as a spring in front of him, it came roaring back full force. Well, if there was ever a time for inquiries … “Can I ask you something?”

Jon huffed, and Martin winced.

“Right. Um. I guess I just wanted to ask–” oh, how to phrase it …? “–is … is there anyone else … here?”

Jon’s eyes lowered to rest on his hands. “No,” he said. “It’s just me. And now you, I suppose.”

And all at once, the pieces fell into place. Jon’s cooking, his nonchalance about the borrowed clothes, the dust that had settled in a thick carpet over everything Martin, or Jon himself, hadn’t touched. For the second time today Martin was left staring, dumbfounded. “… I don’t understand.”

“What’s there to understand?”

“This place is gigantic. Don’t you …” Martin glanced down at his lap, thumbing a loose thread in the duvet. “There’s really no one here?”

It was the wrong thing to say. Jon’s eyes flashed. “I don’t need your pity. Why else would I be here if I didn’t prefer it this way?”

Martin opened his mouth, but Jon stood before he could reply, stormclouds thundering in his eyes. “This has been more than enough excitement for one day– I’ll let you get some rest.”

He’d already made it to the door when Martin regained control of his voice. “Thank you for the ointment.”

Jon stopped, one hand frozen on the door’s handle. “Pardon?”

“The hand cream. It, uh, it helped. Thank you for noticing. And … and I’m sorry for … everything, I guess.”

Jon stared at him for a long moment, then lifted his chin. “Glad I could be of some service.”

The door clicked shut behind him, and Martin counted his footsteps until even their echoes faded down the hall entirely.

It was probably for the best that he followed Jon’s instructions and got some rest. He had the gnawing sense that he was wearing out his welcome, fast.

He’d already nestled back into the mattress when a flash outside his window made him shoot back up.

Snow. Fluttering snowflakes were dancing on an invisible wind just beyond the glass. Martin rubbed his eyes– once, twice– but they were still there.

A trick of the light– it had to be. Some … half-asleep hallucination. He still had a ways to go before he was recovered, after all. Imagine– snow, at this time of year.

Putting it out of his mind, Martin pulled the duvet over him, and, with very little effort, drifted away again.

“–Hello?”

Martin stumbled to a halt, dinner tray in hand. What the hell was he doing? He didn’t have time to stop– there was still so much of the hallway left to go. But …

There. A door had appeared in the hall. Or had it always been there? For the life of him he couldn’t remember. Why couldn’t he remember …?

“You’re going to be late,” Charles said, somewhere off in the distance.

Late. Yes: Barclay’s dinner. He … he needed to leave. He was going to get everybody in trouble–

“–go.”

There it was again. Martin’s legs were stone; unable to move to the door, unable to move down the hallway. They had said go, right? He had to deliver Barclay’s dinner. But …

“You’re going to be late,” Mum said. Her eyes were hazy, unclear. What a wretched son he was; couldn’t even recall the colour of his own mother’s eyes …

“I’m sorry,” he said, but even he couldn’t tell who it was for.

Martin woke with aching arms and gummed eyes. Sunbeams were once again pouring in through his window, and this time, the accompanying disorientation faded faster.

Was it already morning? He must’ve slept right through dinner– this bloody mattress made it too easy.

And for once he was actually hungry. Properly hungry, too, without the accompanying nausea or weakness he’d grown accustomed to during his morning routine at the castle.

Today the silver tray was waiting for him on the desk– Jon had already come through this morning, likely an effort to keep him from waking, or wandering off again.

It was only as Martin was reaching for the tray that he noticed the books. Three of them, stacked on top of each other. Next to them were several pieces of folded parchment.

Martin, the letter started, with graceful, cursive handwriting, and something in Martin’s chest swooped low.

Here are some collections from the library, should you find yourself in need of entertainment. I had some difficulty choosing a recommendation, but I feel that these three have fairly universal appeal. Please take your injury into consideration, but I trust you to do what feels right for yourself.

Kinsey’s Survival on the Front Lines, especially, I find quite compelling. It’s a collection of memoirs from Kinsey’s time in war, and while a few have criticised his writing style as a bit dry, I find the contrast between his straightforwardness against the reality of war is how he’s able to make his point so clearly …

Martin read slowly, eyebrows climbing higher and higher with each word.

The letter was five pages total, front and back. All detailing Jon’s reasoning for the selections he’d made, from their historical relevance, to his opinion on their style of prose. Was there anything in Martin’s life that he could talk about for so long? That he was so passionate about? Maybe his poetry, mediocre as it was, but not with half as much eloquence.

Buried in the text, tucked between hesitant, tentative platitudes, were Jon’s personal reasons for enjoying each book, such as I would often find myself returning to this text during my apprenticeship, and Some might consider Williamson’s humour a bit crude, but I still found it enjoyable.

Martin lingered longest on these, drinking in each tidbit with the avidity of a book-starved scholar.

The letter concluded with,

By now I’ve realised I needn’t have gone on for so long, but I’ve already spent two hours writing this, and it seems a wasted effort if I just tossed it, so … there you are. If you made it this far, anyway. Admirable, if you have.

If the choice between the three books still proves to be too much, I would suggest Sutherland’s Mythos of the Ages as a start. It’s simple, but, as I’ve mentioned, the illustrative work is astounding, and although it’s rather sentimental, I find the tales of some comfort to me.

Jon

Martin traced the elegant swoop of the J, heart ballooning in his chest until he might burst.

Oh.

–

If you would like to be notified of MoMM news and chapter updates, please message me your user name and I will tag you in future posts. Otherwise, check out the MoMM tag on my page in order to stay up to date.

@itspandaatsume123 @thesmallestzita

#the magnus archives #tma #jonmartin #fanfiction #this is how james cameron must feel #guys i swear avatar 2 is gonna happen!!#i swear!!#avatar 2 is def happening yal!!#momm

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anhed-nia · 4 years

Text

BLOGTOBER 10/4/2020: SOCIETY

Without having a survey to back me up, I feel comfortable asserting that as a horror fan, you go through different phases with SOCIETY. It’s a basic fact of life, and yet it morphs and mutates underneath you, shocking you anew just when you think you’ve got a grip on it. You never forget your first time, because there is simply nothing like it. Then, after you get over the initial shock of its patented brand of body horror, you start to take it for granted; it's so broad and monolithic that it becomes something like the Grand Canyon--when it’s not right there in front of you, you begin to experience it more iconically, as part of the wallpaper of existence, rather than an in-your-face confrontation with the limits of experience. Then, you revisit it every few years (or months, depending on what sort of person you are), and the prophylactic layer that your brain has wrapped around your memories of it--the one that allows you to think of SOCIETY as a fun, wacky cheap thrill--begins to crumble, and you realize all over again how iconoclastically vile it is. Wherever you happen to be at, with this inimitable genre landmark, you'd be hard pressed to deny that it earns its royal status among horror movies, just for being so uniquely fucked up.

Filmmaker Brian Yuzna is best known as the co-creator of the indispensable RE-ANIMATOR (or as the co-writer of HONEY, I SHRUNK THE KIDS...depending on what sort of person you are, again), itself a milestone achievement in the blending of sex and gore that so characterized '80s horror production. That film clearly brought out the best in Yuzna and frequent collaborator Stuart Gordon (also of HONEY, I SHRUNK THE KIDS fame...among other things), but it's interesting to see how they operate apart, to understand the unique ingredients that each filmmaker brought to the more perfect union of their classic Lovecraft adaptation. Gordon skewed darker and more intellectual, as evidenced by the end of his career with the shattering mob thriller KING OF THE ANTS, the disturbing true crime drama STUCK, and the Mamet-penned EDMOND. Yuzna, for his part, is almost anti-intellectual, preferring to cook up blackly comic, semi-pornographic nightmares like his two increasingly horny RE-ANIMATOR sequels, the terminal S&M fantasy RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD 3, and the shamelessly hokey comic book adaptation FAUST: LOVE OF THE DAMNED. Yuzna's lack of shame is really his defining feature as an artist, and nowhere is this more obvious than in his directorial debut and signature masterpiece, SOCIETY.

Salvador Dali's "The Great Masturbator," a chief visual inspiration for SOCIETY.

Yuzna was able to leverage the success of RE-ANIMATOR to lock in two directorial opportunities, BRIDE OF RE-ANIMATOR, and a bizarre body horror exercise about a Beverly Hills orphan who discovers that not only are his adoptive family from a different bloodline, but they're not even from the same species. That both pictures employed the writing team of Woody Keith and Rick Fry gives you a little taste of what to expect from SOCIETY, but to be frank, the latter threatens to make the former look like a very special episode of ER; "overkill" barely begins to describe SOCIETY’s ambitious assault on the human body. In a recent interview, the philipino-american director giggles perversely, "I think my friends were a little embarrassed for me (when they saw SOCIETY)," and this sound bite reminded me that the last, most important ingredient that Yuzna contributes to any project is unabashed joy. It's a little hard to imagine stomaching SOCIETY without it.

In this unusual scene from the class struggle in Beverly Hills, Billy Warlock (son of HALLOWEEN 2's Michael Myers, Dick Warlock) plays Bill Whitney, a rich, handsome, athletic high school student with a heavy duty anxiety disorder. Although he appears to have it all, he is plagued by nightmares and hallucinations, reflecting suspicions that the family that spoils him is also out to get him. Perhaps this is all understandable, though. Bill is under a lot of pressure these days, with his parents devoting all of their attention to his sister's coming out party, and his narcissistic girlfriend pushing him to ingratiate himself to the assholes higher up the social ladder; it's enough to make any teenager feel alienated and insecure. But, do these garden variety anxieties account for his visions of his sister's body deforming itself unnaturally, or the dubious evidence he finds that her debutante ball involves incestuous orgies and human sacrifice? Is Bill simply crumbling under the strain of societal expectations, or is the friction with his shrink, his parents, and his peers all symptomatic of an elaborate plot against him by elites who are truly less than human?

I can’t believe they use this cheapo blanket trick MORE THAN ONCE in a movie that is famous for its unforgettable special effects, and I guess I kind of love it.

In case I haven't made the answer abundantly obvious, I'll add that while SOCIETY is the purest expression of Yuzna-ness on the market, it has an important co-author in Screaming Mad George. The eccentric japanese FX master, whose name is apparently an amalgamation of Mad Magazine, Screamin' Jay Hawkins, and...George, has produced some of horror's most outrageous makeup and visual effects, mostly for Yuzna, many of them in SOCIETY. If you've seen even a trailer for Alex Winter's 1993 oddity FREAKED--which is itself a grossout criticism of American social standards--then you are already familiar with SMG's trademark style. He specializes in twisted perversions of the human form that would make a cenobite blush, driven by a penchant for puns, and influenced equally by THE THING's Rob Botin, and Big Daddy Roth’s Rat Fink style. Screaming Mad George is instrumental in articulating Yuzna's premise: that behind the shimmering veneer of success and sophistication, the upper class are just a bunch of degenerates, who literally degenerate into something unimaginable behind closed doors. It's impossible to imagine SOCIETY without his sinuous, slithering monstrosities, or his indescribable realization of their most important social event, "the shunt".

One of many great images from a zine I wish I owned, on SMG’s Facebook page.

It's easy to get overwhelmed by SOCIETY's visual impact, but its message is just as potent now as it was at the end of the Reagan era: Rich people are not only different from the rest of us, but in fact, they aren't even human. Writers Keith and Fry make an interesting choice of hero to help put this across. A lazier writer would have selected any archetype from the Freaks and Geeks set to create an easy Us vs Them tension, but SOCIETY is led by a promising young man who, for reasons he himself does not yet understand, is just not "the right kind of people". Bill appears to have every advantage in life, including a level of popularity that wins him presidency of the debate team despite his nerdier rival’s superior prowess--and yet, he suffers from a stigmatizing psychiatric disorder that is the natural result of feeling indefinably different from one's peers, and intuiting that, as a consequence, they don't even really like you. The shallow jock with deep-seated emotional problems is a much more interesting protagonist for this kind of social allegory than the charismatic outcasts that you get in movies like THE FACULTY and DISTURBING BEHAVIOR, for whom the idea that the elites could be aliens is just de rigueur.

It's worth noting that this complexity of character extends to Bill's love interest, sympathetic society girl Clarissa Carlyn (Playboy Playmate Devin DeVasquez). At first, she seems villainously eager to introduce Bill to the many splendors of "the shunting", but as the plot against him mounts to its horrifying conclusion, she defects. There appears to be a reason for this, although honestly, this is the most difficult part of SOCIETY for me to wrap my head around. Clarissa lives as an essentially independent adult, only burdened by her mother (Pamela Matheson), a possibly brain damaged hulk who lurks in and out of various scenes just to be disturbing, always announced by some toots on a tuba, before eventually siding with our heroes. I'm really not sure what's supposed to be going on in this part of the movie, except that this character contributes to a number of distasteful jokes. But, I hold on to the idea that by virtue of whatever disorder Mrs. Carlyn suffers from, she serves the purpose of priming Clarissa to rebel, since her very existence makes her daughter something of a societal outcast herself. That's the best I can do.

In any case, everyone working on SOCIETY commits completely, with Mrs. Carlyn being no exception. The movie's climactic orgy of the damned is an all hands on deck operation, just as reliant on Screaming Mad George's artistic abilities as it is on the actors' responsibility to make you believe that this fucked up shit is really happening. There's a visceral patina of sleaze spread over the entire film, dripping from the way that characters talk to and touch each other, flirting and flaunting their bodies in a distinctly unseemly fashion, even when it stays within the realm of mundane reality. This constant sinister, insinuating attitude on the part of the whole cast lays the foundation for what is to come, and while I appreciate everybody's hard work, my favorite performance is from an actor who only comes in at the very end: David Wiley as society king Judge Carter. Wiley's career consisted almost exclusively of the most ordinary sort of television work, which makes his outrageous turn in this alien porno flick all the more respectable. While other characters transition from suspicious pod people to full-on mutated perverts, Judge Carter has to show up just for the finale, establish his authority, rip off his clothes, and plunge straight into a sea of slime, happily fisting his way through the cast. Wiley meets this challenge with aplomb, making of himself a hybrid of Robert Englund and Gene Hackman, perfectly embodying the movie's joyful absurdity, and never betraying the slightest hint of embarrassment.

SOCIETY is very much a don't-look-down type of endeavor, a fairy that could expire at the slightest lapse in faith. There's a visual pun in the last act that's so gross, so offensive, so frankly idiotic, that I don't have the courage to describe it; my whole body tenses up when I know this scene is coming, as if it were the meat hook scene in TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE or the brutal rape in the middle of SHOWGIRLS. I don't like it, but at the same time, I respect Yuzna's unhesitating commitment to show it to me, and I think that actor Charles Lucia should get some kind of award for shouldering the burden so valiantly. SOCIETY is a daring movie in the truest sense, a film with more balls than brains, and in this it exposes the limitation of intelligence and taste, and the real need for pure transgression, in producing art of any real value. You might argue with me about whether Yuzna's masturbatory magnum opus really qualifies as art, but to respond to that, I'll quote the great transgressor Alejandro Jodorowsky: "If you are great, EL TOPO is a great picture. If you are limited, EL TOPO is limited." So stick that in your shunt and smoke it.

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PS Here, have this stuck in your head for the rest of your life.

#blogtober #2020 #society #brian yuzna #screaming mad george #woody keith #rick fry #billy warlock #Keith Walley #devin devasquez #david wiley #horror #black comedy #satire #body horror #social criticism

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jjyusmile · 4 years

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lonely | kang hyung-gu (kino)

kang hyung-gu (kino) | lonely

pairing: bestfriend!kino x {gender-neutral} reader!

word count: 2,693

notes: best friends to lovers au! this story is inspired by kino’s song and music video ‘lonely’ because its pure and he deserves attention. i love kino and you should too :) i take requests!

here is the link to the music video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSoN4v1G8Os

__________________________________

The steam rose from the idle cups of black coffee that sat between you. They served more purpose as hand warmers than they did a delicious drink. You were sat outside of a café on a set of wicker chairs opposite one another. The winter sun fell over Tokyo like a cosy blanket; the way Kino’s ears poked out under his cap made the grin that hadn’t faded since you surprised him last night even more endearing.

Everything had been planned with Hongseok and it all went smoothly, except for him being late to pick you up at Haneda airport.

[me: 21:17pm] hey seok, i’m here

[hongseokie 🤪: 21:19pm] ah shit, I uh- forgot

[me: 21:20pm] i swear to god if you’re not here in 5 minutes~ I’ll hide your chicken breasts.

[hongseokie 🤪: 21:21pm] 🗿

He turned up 25 minutes later – hot chocolate in hand with a smiling Hui in the passenger seat. It warmed your heart that you got to see the rest of the boys, as well as your best friend.

Today was their only scheduled day off, and Kino was more than excited to spend it with his best friend. Spending the morning messing about in your hotel room, it was almost sunset by the time you left to start exploring.

He broke the comfortable silence as he sang under his breath, staring into the distance of the skyline. “A day without you is so lonely.”

You giggled, your warmed hand coming to cover your mouth. It had been months since you last saw each other. Your last memory was your brother’s wedding when he had to leave halfway through to catch a flight to Thailand for the first leg of their tour. You smiled fondly at your best friend for a moment.

“Lonely indeed,” you retorted sarcastically. “What are we doing with the rest of our day then, Gu?”

He pondered exaggeratedly, a finger cupping his chin. The movement made you giggle louder. You knew what you would do. You did the same in any city you visited with Kino – wander aimlessly until you found something you liked.

Within moments, you were strolling down the streets of Shinjuku with your arm wrapped around Kino’s. Before leaving the café, he forced you to wear his oversized black ‘fxxking rabbits’ sweatshirt after you had left your hotel room in a short-sleeved shirt on a chilly day. The length of the sleeves drowned your short arms creating sweater paws that you gladly welcomed in the icy climate. Your camera hung from its straps loosely around your neck, bumping slightly against your stomach as you fell into step together.

Heading in the direction of the National Garden, you focused on how the winter sunset caught Kino’s skin with a natural glow. Under his purple NY Yankees, you noticed how the high points of his cheeks turned a rosy pink from the chill, a similar shade covering his nose. With his cosy sweatshirt now on your person, he was left in a faded beige button-up with a black t-shirt underneath loosely tucked into his dark-wash denim jeans.

He must be freezing. You snuggled in a little closer than usual, to which Kino welcomed the warmth.

Usually, silence between people would be uncomfortable, with the occasional awkward glance toward the other. But this was different. Even after months of video calls until early hours of the morning, it only seemed like yesterday he left your brother’s wedding. The silence was oddly comforting, enjoying each other’s company whilst strolling across the overpass of the highway.

“What are you thinking about?” Your thoughts formed into words before you could confirm the action, breaking the silence with his eyes trained on you.

“Nothing… For the first time in a long time, I’m not thinking of anything.” You smiled at his genuine response. It had been a hectic time for Kino and the group; in the last two years, you had seen him for more than a week at only Christmas.

You were nervous to meet him this time. It wasn’t unusual for you to travel to a city to join the boys for a few days, but this time felt different.

You wanted to hold him closer than you usually would. You felt more comfortable when his attention was focused on you, rather than the girl whose attention he caught by just passing by.

With the camera focused to capture his content look, your movements went barely noticed by Kino. As you got older, you knew that your love for him had shifted; you weren’t sure when, or what moment, but absence always makes the heart grow fonder.

He turned his head at the perfect moment as the shutter clicked. His rosy features filled the frame; they complimented his joyful grin as his focus lingered on you.

“Can I try?” He removed the straps from under the hood of his sweatshirt and placed them around his own neck.

You hated being in front of the camera – it was the sole reason you took up photography in the first place. To be the one behind the lens. But the look on his face and his playful mood made you feel more at ease. Attempting to hide your face, your fists came up to shape your cheeks as they knocked against your glasses.

Enamoured by the view, Kino focused on the way your small figure glowed against the skyline behind you. The sun radiated against your skin in a way that made him feel warm. He clicked the shutter on your camera quickly before moving on.

“Kino!” you whined, “please just give it back.”

But within moments, he took out his phone to snap a shot of you, candidly walking toward him with a half-playful, half-serious look that he adored. Your hand was slightly reaching toward him to grab the camera, the sleeve completely protecting it from any sunlight. You failed to notice how that image became his wallpaper from that moment on.

“Fine, fine.” You snatched the camera back, with a playful glare toward your best friend. The look earned you a cheeky grin in return, as his arm looped around your shoulders, heading back into the direction of the Gardens.

You wandered aimlessly as usual, with occasional chatter and playfulness between you. Kino managed to persuade you to buy him Takoyaki from the friendly woman at the vendor outside of the park as you left. She complimented how happy you looked together, causing a blush to arise on your cheeks and your attempt to drag Kino away by his shirt before he says anything stupid was quick.

Before long, Kino had dragged you to a set of escalators that led to an arcade. They lit up in rainbow LED lights that turned Kino’s glowing skin from blue to pink, to orange then green. As you went up the escalator, you admired how he lifted his cap to fix his fair. Another comfortable silence surrounded you both as you looked up into the direction you were heading.

Lost in thought, Kino noticed how your hand was slightly peeking out of his sweatshirt sleeve. You felt his fingers loosely intertwine with your own, making you almost lose your balance as you stepped off the escalator. You stopped walking once you were both off the moving staircase and out of harm’s way, looking up to meeting his eyes.

“What?” he questioned, “your hands are cold.” He turned away mid-sentence, hiding his face under his cap once more.

You missed the small smile that fell on his lips as he started to drag you toward the claw machine.

He spent over twenty minutes on a single claw machine with the promise that he would win you the Eevee plush you have wanted since you were a child. The whole time, his fingers had not let go of your own. The point of contact serving as an energy and warmth booster to you both.

Kino grinned at your captivated look as you pressed your forehead to the glass with your free hand sliding down the glass dramatically. Your breath visible was against the machine as you inhaled and exhaled rhythmically. You watched as the final claw wrapped around Eevee and clung on like its life depended on it; you were frozen in place until it unhinged its clench and the plush dropped into the winner’s pit.

You squealed excitedly as Kino handed you the prize and you squeezed it with a wide grin. Your eyes crinkled genuinely making Kino’s hold on your hand grow a little bit tighter.

You continued to wander the streets throughout the evening. Coming to a stop by a small plaza covered in Christmas decorations, Kino led you under a dome of lights and stopped in the center to take a picture of you. The common occurrence of the day became a lot less daunting, especially when he turned the camera onto both of you.

You smiled fondly at the front camera lens, and noticed Kino pointed to his cheek on the screen. A flow of confidence came over you as you leant up to kiss him on the cheek, which turned his bubbly aura into a shocked, humoured one.

Giggling, your hand came up to your face to hide your slight blush.

“You’re supposed to do it like this,” Kino murmured distractedly.

He pointed to your cheek, and then the other. He moved to point to your eyes one at time, then settled for the bridge of your nose. Each spot met with a soft brush of his lips with a mischievous glimmer in his eyes that failed to go unnoticed.

His face was much closer than it had ever been to your own as he leant down to your eye level. His previous actions were a mere whisper compared to how close his nose brushed your own, and the slight feather of his breath that fell onto your lips.

Although his face serious, the mischievous glimmer had not shifted, confirming your thoughts that this really was your best friend.

His hand came up to brush your fringe that had fallen into your eyes and slowly ran his thumb against your cheek before backing away and wandering into the crowded streets once more.

It took a few moments to catch your breath before you hurried after him with new-found courage. Finding his figure wasn’t difficult after this many years of friendship, and when your hand found his from behind he barely flinched, the movement becoming more natural as the night went on.

As the sun completely disappeared and your breath had become more visible in the moonlit atmosphere, Kino pulled you into the nearest clothing store to buy more layers for you both. It wasn’t much like Kino to be materialistic, but the puffy jacket he bought you was more about his generous personality than the money. That was what you loved about him - Hyunggu had a big heart.

Alongside your black jacket, he bought himself a matching one with a white sweatshirt to go underneath. Hand in hand, you left the shop feeling warm with your layers, as well as the warmth coming from his hand wrapped around your smaller one. Throughout the night, Kino got used to holding your hand, feeling less of an urge to squeeze it to reassure him that you’re still there.

You were still there as you sipped on your milk tea. You were still there when the street performer invited him up mid-performance, earning a giggle from you.

He had become much more intimate with his touches, rather than a soft bump on the shoulder when he found you funny, he resorted to a slight boop to your nose – another endearing trait that made you want to joke all the time.

His longing gazes caught you yawning every so often, the street lights faintly accentuating your tired features. The way his sweatshirt engulfed your body looked much cuter paired with the jacket he had just bought you. Your glasses were slowly slipping down the bridge of your nose.

Sighing, Kino turned the edge of the pavement, his free hand waving down a taxi. You perked up slightly at his actions, questioning with a furrowed brow.

“Don’t even try to tell me you’re ready and raring for another walk around the block. You haven’t stopped yawning since we left the boba place.” Another boop to the nose. So, it’s not just jokes – noted.

You smiled drowsily and huddled into his side to keep warm as you waited. His arm wrapped around your shoulder as he gently caressed the nape of your neck absentmindedly.

The journey back to your hotel was silent, but the buzz that ran through your body mirrored that of Kino’s. You were tired but you knew you were far from sleep.

His hand had barely left yours all evening. This heart-warming feeling wasn’t new – he had ached to hold your hand for a long time. The subtle confidence that had awoken in both of you crossed the boundaries that were automatically set between best friends.

Despite your efforts, sleep had washed over you quickly as the warmth radiated from Kino. Without waking you, he had paid the driver and managed to carry you on his back to your hotel room. Your head rested lightly against his shoulder sending chills down his spine as your breath fanned over his neck.

Silently taking your room key out of your cross body, he stepped into the room and place you on the bed with your head on the pillow. As he went over to close the curtains and camp out on the floor, your hand subconsciously grabbed onto the hem of his jacket, pulling him back. The peaceful look that washed over your face as you realised he wasn’t going anywhere made your unconscious state even more adorable in his eyes.

Leaving the curtains open slightly, Kino lifted you up to remove your jacket and shoes while doing the same with his own. Finding a blanket in the closet, he draped it over your figure while leaving room behind you for himself.

___

You woke suddenly from your dreamy state to a slight weight on your body whilst checking the clock that faintly illuminated the room: 4:03am.

The curtains had been left open slightly with slight flashes of billboards and passing cars leaking through the slit. The weight focused around your waist as an arm wrapped a bit tighter to ensure you stayed in place.

The heat becoming unbearable, you wriggled your way out of Kino’s arms to lift the sweatshirt that you were wearing over your head and lowered the blanket to waist height before you snuggled back into bed.

A wave of confidence washed over you as you turned from your previous position to lie facing Kino. The faint lights from the window created a shadow on the left side of his face that smushed against the pillow – his styled hair now falling in tufts over his forehead.

Subconsciously, you smoothed away loose strands that fell into his eyes as you gazed at the dimples that adorned the corners of his mouth as he slept. Your actions stirred Kino awake slowly, but you didn’t bother to remove your hand from his face.

As his hand grazed your side to pull you closer, your palm fell against his cheek as your thumb rubbed against his cheekbone. His once content face shifted as his eyes began to crinkle along with a shy smile that adorned his lips. His free hand lifted to cup your own cheek and brought your face close enough so his lips could brush against your forehead.

And you remained in that position until the sun began to rise over the Shinjuku skyline, bringing a new day that welcomed the slight shift in your relationship.

Your eyes opened as the rhythmic exhales that came from Kino became more prominent. But Kino was already awake, his eyes wandering across your face trying to memorise every feature he could.

A soft smile grazed his lips. “So, I guess we should talk, huh?”

A day without you is lonely, indeed.

#kino #kino au #kino pentagon #pentagon au #kino fluff #pentagon fluff #kpop scenario #kpop au #gender neutral kpop

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peachnewt · 4 years

Text

Midnight Snack - Playing House

Fluff to the max. Intimate times between two men insinuated but not graphically described in text. Deep kissing is present. Skip between the &&& if you prefer to not read it. The Getting In Deep series and it’s short stories are my own creation. Do not steal or alter.

Papers, magazine cutouts, and equations sat in piles on Will's desk. Will, headless of the slippery magazine paper that threatened to kiss the ground, kept taking notes from his screen.

When Reese arrived, he was surprised to see Will at work before everyone else in Main Tech.

"Getting a head start on a case?" asked Reese.

"No." Will tabbed his screen and frowned. "I'm helping Louis find a house."

"Really?" Reese wondered how far Louis and Will had gotten in their relationship. "Why would he want to move?"

Reese walked around Will's desk to look at the screen.

When house hunting, most people imagine realtors, property tax, curb appeal, square footage, and zoning issues. The average challenges one would find on HGTV shows. Reese expected to see Zillow listings, or Homefinder. He hadn't expected Barbie's Malibu Dream Home from Toys-R-Us.

Reese blinked, wondering if the morning caffeine had yet to kick in. "A dollhouse?"

Louis walked into Main Tech with two mugs. "Yeah, because everything I found is, in Will's words, "dinky plastic trash"."

"They don't even have it proportioned right. I did the calculations," said Will, scrolling through the preview images of other child- sized dollhouse. "The bathtub is right next to the door, who does that?"

"Those things are meant for playing with, not living in," said Louis, nursing his second cup of coffee and handing Will his tea. They had spent the last half hour descending into a research spiral of toy sites looking at houses and miniatures. Louis began thinking this was actually worse than real house hunting.

"I have a civil engineering degree, I'm allowed to be offended," said Will.

"You would be offended at the construction of a gingerbread house."

"Those are for decoration and eating. It's not the same thing."

"One moment. I feel like I need a little bit of clarification." Reese struggled to catch up with the train of thought Louis and Will had gotten on, apparently leaving him behind at the station. "Louis, why are you in the market for a dollhouse?"

Louis sat and spun his chair to catch the slipping pile of magazine clippings. "Because some nights I'm sleeping in a shoebox on Rachel's desk."

There had been nights when Louis was too exhausted to switch back from his tiny sized self and had to sleep in Rachel's office. His "room" consisted of a shoe box with a tiny flat pillow for a mattress, a linen square for a blanket, a charging stand for his large sized phone, and a rectangle hole for a door.

"I feel like a kitten awaiting adoption by the side of the road," Louis continued.

"I see. I wouldn't mind sleeping in a shoebox on Rachel's desk," said Reese, a dreamy look in his eyes.

Beni, carrying a dozen doughnuts in one hand and a RockStar energy drink in the other, paused as she entered Main Tech. "I think I need context."

***

Ten minutes later, Beni had been pulled into the communal craze of looking up tiny dollhouses. They pulled up everything from antique houses made in the 1950s, to Lego replicas of Hogwarts. By a stroke of a keyword during Beni's search, she hit the mother load with DIY Dollhouse kits sold on specialty hobby sites. They ranged from Modern loft apartments, to Chinese homesteads complete with a throne room. They even had miniature cafe's with tiny pastries. Each dollhouse listing came with a video on how to construct it. Of course, with a specialty hobby, it came with a specialty price.

"It's a friggin' bed," said Louis, gesturing to the miniature furniture on the screen. "How hard is it to make a proper bed for at 1/24th scale that isn't going to cost a fortune? That's what... eight popsicle sticks?"

"If you want quality at that size then you are going to pay what its' worth," said Reese. "What is more expensive, a Rolex, or a bedside clock?"

Will pulled up a video with a house similar to a few of the magazine cutouts. "Most of these do-it-yourself kits use either hot glue or E6000. Not keen on having a building kept together with hot glue."

Louis grunted, mesmerized by large hands setting up a tiny living room. "Are we spiraling again?"

"Yes, but it's a very satisfying spiral."

Louis, Will, Reese, and Beni gathered around one screen, tallying the pros and cons of certain designs, and pulling up more DIY dollhouse videos.

When Cetz arrived at Main Tech, he saw four of his agents picking out dollhouses.

Cetz felt a headache coming on. "Know what. I don't need context. Meeting in ten."

Eventually Louis picked a DIY kit for a cabin that put him back sixty dollars. It arrived a week later and Louis set up shop in a spare workroom at the Watch. He proceeded to burn his hand with a hot glue gun while trying to assemble the walls. Will approached with ice, tweezers, and a small tube of craft glue. They finished the small dwelling in an afternoon.

Half of the tiny furnishings, flower pots, pictures, cute figurines of boats, never made it into the cabin. They were pasted together for posterity to say it had been finished, and they left in a heap by the dwelling. None of the furniture went where it was supposed to; Louis didn't trust the stairs to hold if he walked up to the second floor. The bed ,made of thin wood, looked better than the tiny pillow in his shoebox. If nothing else, it looked more like a bed. It looked like a dwelling meant for a human. It even had lighting he could turn off and on with a switch at the bottom of the display platform.

Louis stood back from the cabin and cracked his back. His fingers had nearly been glued together while applying wallpaper, and his eyes ached having to look through a magnifying glass. Will clicked on the light to the house. They looked proud of their creation, showing it off to Beni, Reese, and Rachel when they came by.

"It's a good starter home," said Rachel, handing Louis a bag of coffee grounds with a bow taped on it. "Happy housewarming."

Louis grinned. The cabin itself was slightly wider than his shoebox but twice as tall, and the platform it stood on was as big as a desk blotter.

"I want one," said Beni, flipping the switch on and off.

"Make your own," said Louis.

"I will!" said Beni, a spark of competition in her eyes. "I'll make one so nice you'll want to sleep there instead!"

Reese, enticed leaned over. "Care to make a wager?"

The next day, Beni and Reese also ordered DIY dollhouses.

Louis vowed to never set foot in any of their deathtraps.

Will vowed to make sure neither of them burned their fingers or used adhesives that could cause respiratory distress.

While Beni and Reese awaited their kits, Louis ended up exhausted after a long day of testing, and unable to switch back to normal size. The first night in his new, self-made home. Rachel left him on her desk, the shoebox on one side, and his cabin on the other. Louis stumbled wearily to the cabin. When he laid down on the bed he immediately regretted the thin bit of padding he had mistaken for a mattress. It had looked fluffy enough when he had glued the stuffing down. He dragged the cheap pillow out of the shoebox and into the cabin.

Will found him the next morning splayed akimbo on the cushion, wrapped up in the thin "bed spread" like a croissant.

"Bed not work?"

"I could feel beads of dried glue under the mattress." Louis snuggled tighter into the pillow until Will coaxed him onto his palm and into the lab to "grow up".

Louis had been so miserable with the construction of his tiny bed, he actually looked forward to Beni and Reese's dollhouses

The two kits arrived and Will made sure the construction was a surprise to Louis, warding him from the workshop as Beni and Reese unpacked their kits with child-like glee.

They wondered if the two former thieves ever got something like a dollhouse in their younger years.

Instead of cranking out the houses in an afternoon, Beni and Reese took half hours off between shifts to work on them. Both seemed to find contentment in their distraction. After a week, they were finished.

Reese had constructed a gothic themed Victorian home with a tiny staircase hidden behind a bookshelf full of miniature books. Several windows were painted to look like stained glass. And the bed was a four-poster with a canopy. His pride had been renovating the kitchen area to have a tiny fridge that actually worked and held tiny shots of pudding he had made himself. And on one wall he had put up a tiny grandfather clock, made with a working clock face.

"Somebody likes their gothic," said Will as he squinted to see inside the hidden staircase. "Good detail."

"Classic taste is good taste."

Beni had gone modern with a split level house. White on silver furnishings with touches of neon purple and one of the accent walls for a workout room consisted of an entire mirror. The bed was covered in multiple pillows, each a shade of gray or white. Her pride was adding a slide from the top level to the bottom, the landing cushioned with a layer of cotton balls.

"Very playful," said Will.

"Got most of the style stuff from a Home & Garden magazine. But who wouldn't want a slide in their house?"

Louis shrunk, bypassed all the fancy additions and special furnishings, shooting like a tired arrow towards the beds. First the canopy bed, then a gray bed with all the pillows.

Louis groaned in defeat. "It's still not comfortable enough."

However, he did try the slide, the hidden stairs, and the pudding in the tiny fridge. Beni and Reese then made Louis promise to shrink them so they could experience the houses themselves.

Will eyed the beds and the shoebox a warm glow coming to his eyes. It had been a while since he had done a construction project.

***

The magazine clippings came back out; Will organizing different furniture pieces and photos from Architectural Digest. Over the next month, between date entry and retrieval missions, Will peppered Louis with random questions.

"Dark stain or light?"

"Oriental, log cabin, industrial, modern?"

"How much do you cook verses eating out?"

"Do you like gardens?"

"How about koi ponds?"

"Silk sheets or cotton?"

"How do you not know the answer to that?" said Louis, setting aside another patent. "Cotton."

"I mean if you won the lottery and could afford anything, silk or cotton?" said Will.

"Still cotton."

It wasn't until Will pulled Louis over to look at a blueprint that he caught on to what Will had been doing.

"Are you designing a custom dollhouse for me?"

"Kinda. I'm not an architect, but I thought I could make you something more than a shoebox or a DIY kit." A light blush bloomed on Will's neck. "I want your input on it. You'd be sleeping there after all."

"All I want is a better bed," said Louis. "I respect that little pillow, it's gotten me through some rough nights, but I want a real bed."

From the blueprint it looked similar to some of the custom DIY dollhouses the three of them had constructed. Everything from the steps to the sofa had equations measuring out its diameters so it would match Louis' stature when he shrunk. Multiple chambers, the front wall of the house on a hinge so the insides could be exposed or not, a set of stairs, all on a platform with an outside space with a...

"Is that a gazebo?"

"Yep," said Will. "Do you want a pond or a pool?"

"It's a place for me to sleep when I have to stay the night, fanboy," insisted Louis. "You don't have to go all out with this. I just wanted something better than a shoebox."

"But I want to."

Louis smirked. "Feeling a little competitive after Beni and Reese made their own houses?"

"...little bit."

"I thought so." Louis brushed his lips to the side of Will's mouth, leaving a coffee ghost of a kiss, and grabbed Will's empty mug. They both needed refills. "Have at it, fanboy. Surprise me. Just... no koi pond. Especially no koi; those suckers can get huge."

***

A month later Will led a blindfolded Louis to Rachel's office.

"Are we there yet?" asked Louis.

"One moment." Will let go of Louis' hands with a squeeze. "Stay here. No peeking."

Louis heard the flicking of switches and the opening of a door.

"Okay, you can see."

Louis peeled off the blindfold. Rachel's office was dimmed, the majority of the light coming from another dollhouse. His jaw dropped. It spanned half of Rachel's desk. The house was modern, mostly white trimmed in dark blue and splashes of red. Like most of the DIY dollhouses the insides were exposed for "play", but this one had a full roof and a panel that acted like a door to the whole front half of the house. However, the house only took up a third of the platform.

Behind the house stood a stately garden of green moss, flat pebble paths, and a gazebo overlooking the rise of real seedlings from a small herb patch. In the center of the garden rose a bonsai strung up with tiny lights like a Christmas tree, and a swing. The bonsai stood small in comparison to a regular sized shrub, but to an almost three inch human, it would look like a grand tree.

Louis came closer, leaning in to see the tiny details of the dollhouse. "How in the world did you do something like this?"

"Civil engineer, remember. A lot of my college projects were making models of infrastructure. That and a lot of model kits."

Louis motioned to the hinged front of the house. "Can I...?"

"I made it for you, yes!"

Louis opened the front of the house to an open floor plan, tiny lighting, bits of shiny tile, and dark stained furniture. The DIY houses had similar plans, but this one seemed polished, more real than play.

"Cetz and Reese helped assemble most of the house," said Will. "Beni picked out the bonsai."

"The furniture." Louis gently picked up the coffee table from the living room. I weighed heavy in his hand, not balsa wood or cardboard. "Those aren't popsicle sticks. How the hell did you...?"

"I have some crafty friends on the con circuit that were willing to do some detailed commissions. A lot of it was 3D printed, but the finer furniture was done by hand. Not a hot-glue stick in sight."

Louis set down the coffee table and took a closer look at the kitchen. "Those drawers actually pull out?"

"Yep."

"The sink... holy shit there is actual water."

"Yeah, actual plumbing. We'll have to do the dishes by hand, no dishwasher that size. But there is water in the kitchen area and the bathroom, both connected to a gallon water heater under the desk."

Louis noted the "we". One of them washing while the other dried with the tiny towels and the tiny drying rack. A domestic image he never thought he'd get in real life. Well, really tiny life.

"Reese installed his patented snack fridge, I see," said Louis.

"Snacks are a must," said Will. "Fully stocked with bits of cheese, chocolate, pudding, and a slice of pepperoni. Eating like borrowers."

"Every window has curtains."

"And blackout curtains if you need some dark space."

A refuge, Louis realized. If I need space or time and I'm stuck, I don't have to feel like a lab rat.

"That's actual leather on that couch," said Louis, dragging his mind back to the house tour.

"I could afford a quarter yard of real leather."

Louis saw two charging ports for phones set into the wall so the screens could act as a television. He could imagine the movie nights. One giant kernel of popped corn between them.

"The doors actually shut and lock?" asked Louis.

"Tiny magnets in the door and door frame. Also..." Will pointed to where the front of the house closed, hiding the view of the inside. "Push a latch here, and the whole front of the house will lock from the inside so you can have privacy."

Louis reopened the front of the house. He followed the line of sight from the living room, up the stairs, to the bedroom. Dark wood furnishings and soft gray upholstery. The bed looked neat and tidy as a stuffed envelope, lined in silvery blue and deep red pillows.

"I made the bed."

"Like you folded the sheets or you made the bed and bed frame personally?" He had to ask because it seemed Will had been willing to spin his own thread for the sheets.

"Both. Took a couple of live video tutorials for the frame. No craft glue, or double sided tape. Half a drop of wood paste, tiny dove joints, and teeny finishing nails. I know you said cotton, but I got denier microfiber silk fabric for the sheets so the thickness is comparable what you would have at normal size."

Louis pressed a finger down on the tiny bed, eyeballing the measurements. "California King?"

"Yep." Will skipped over the fact he had carved by hand a bed definitely made for two. "Cut the mattress out of memory foam."

Louis examined the rest of the bedroom. Interesting that Will had included a washbasin and washcloths when there was an en suite bathroom. No closet or wardrobe, instead an empty trunk lay at the foot of the bed. Louis wouldn't need changes of clothing since whatever he shrunk with would have to grow back with him. The lamp on the bedside table gave a golden glow. When he opened the bedside cabinet he found a few extra amenities that made the back of his neck heat up.

Will's bashful look said it all.

"Wow." Louis cleared his throat, trying to draw his mind away from the bedroom. The gesture of it all struck him deep. Will and he still lived in separate places. Will had made a place for them to be together. A home that belong to them, not one or the other.

Okay. No tears. Suck it up.

Louis sniffed, needing a distraction. "So, random question, what was the most expensive thing in this whole house?"

"Well, parts of the electrical plan and plumbing nearly cost me my patience."

Louis snickered, pulling Will in by the back of the head to kiss his temple. "Your poor brain. Let me guess, the leather couch?"

"Nope. Made from scraps. Very cheap."

"The tiny fridge?"

"The way Reese made it, no. It cost me a dozen maple bacon doughnuts and a cheesecake."

"The bonsai. Gotta be the bonsai."

"Actually the bonsai was the second most expensive thing. But Beni did some good bargaining."

"Really?"

"Mh hm."

"What was the most expensive then?"

Will touched the fine sheet on the bed.

"The bed?" said Louis.

"The sheets," Will clarified.

"How are a tiny set of sheets that expensive?!"

"When you include express shipping from Japan."

"Fanboy!"

"You said the bed was the most important thing, so I made sure it got the right stuff!"

Laughter took over when Louis refused tears. He hugged Will closed, his nose brushing into hair that still smelled of soap.

"C'mere. Thank you. I can't believe you went so far for this."

"I wanted to," murmured Will into Louis' neck, leaving a soft touch of breath.

Will had wanted to give him a home. Louis wanted Will to know he was home.

&&&

It sent a shiver down Louis' back, making his belly flutter. He leaned back on the desk until he sat on it, his thigh close to pushing off a pencil box. Then he pulled Will by the hips until he stood between his legs, chest to chest. Louis curled his head under Will's neck. Will's hands draped across Louis shoulders as if a buoy to a drowning man and breathed in deep. Warmth surrounded them like an atmosphere growing around a new planet.

Louis looked over at the house and smirked. He wouldn't mind spending the night, if he had company.

"Wanna test out the bed?" said Louis, pulling back. "Make sure it's up to your standards?"

"You mean you want to see if you can wreck the bed," said Will.

"I know I can wreck you on the bed; if I can wreck the bed with you, bonus."

The blush at Will's neck charged over the hinge of his jaw and conquered his cheeks and nose. Louis knew by experience the blushing army had already conquered collarbones and sternum. He planted the final flag of victory by drawing Will's head down for a kiss, deeper than the rest. Will relaxed into his embrace like a puddle needing earth to sink into. Their chests expanded wider with each breath, trying to catch each other in the air around them to pull into their lungs and keep.

Will pulled back, nipping Louis' jaw. "I dropped the bed, twice." Nip. "Survived both times." A kiss on the chin. "I'd like to see you achieve what my clumsiness and gravity could not."

"That a challenge?" Louis bent his head down, pressed his lips around Will's Adam's apple, and sucked.

Will moaned, his voice buzzing against Louis' mouth. Louis pulled Will in by the shoulders as he leaned back further onto the desk, and then focused on the light. In a breathless flash, they both sat on the desk, just short of three inches tall. After a moment to orient themselves, and calm down enough to get to their feet, they both ran to the door of the dollhouse.

The bed did not break. Though they tried.

They collapsed under sheets of light silk, catching their breath as sweat cooled on their aching bodies. Will had been wise to include a wash basin, thought Louis. He didn't want to go all the way to the bathroom for a washcloth.

&&&

Will tucked himself into the curve of Louis' body. "So... home sweet home?"

"Maybe." Louis leaned down and kissed right below Will's sternum, tasting heated skin. "I've got a home here too."

Oh, that blush would not go away for hours now.

"Yeah, you do," whispered Will.

A well deserved exhaustion overtook them.

Louis woke before Will. Making sure Will kept dreaming, Louis scurried out of the house and over to the side of Rachel's desk that still held the cabin. To the side lay the pile of extra frills that had come with the DIY house; bits of potted plants, fake books and posters. He picked up a piece of thick printed cardstock about the size of a large postage stamp, and carried it back to Will's house. It had been a miscellaneous bit of inspirational word art one could find in any furnishing or poster aisle at a craft shop, but it seemed very appropriate.

"Where there's a will, there's a way".

Louis set it by the front door of the new house and then went back in. He would see if Reese had put anything in the tiny fridge that could help construct a breakfast in bed.

---------------

If you enjoyed this short, consider buying me a ko-fi!

#GETTING IN DEEP #midnight snack #Giant/tiny #Louis Patriarch #William James Rowe #g/t #dollhouse #ideas that happen after seeing too many diy dollhouses on youtube #and now i want one

51 notes · View notes

galaxysgal · 4 years

Text

Something Witchy This Way Comes Chapter 4: Simple Joys

Warnings: A scene of like, waking up from a nightmare, but no nightmare description. Also swear words maybe? Very brief mention of death.

Wordcount: 1,137

A/N: this was one of the first chapters I actually wrote and i love it so much. Beta’d by the amazing @honeykiwis. I was feeling kinda sad because last chapter didn’t get a lot of recognition but either way, I hope you guys enjoy this!

Read Here on my Ao3

xxx xxx xxx xxx

Finn woke up with blood pounding in his ears, the remnants of a vision slowly fading from his mind. “No, no no no,” he murmured, scrambling for a pen and paper in the nightstand beside him. He clicked on the light and grabbed the notepad. His gut told him this vision was important, but he couldn’t quite grasp it. The images slipped through the cracks of his memory, dissolving into the night until all that was left was an uneasy feeling in the pit of his stomach.

He looked over at Poe, the hard lines of his face softened in sleep. The blanket was entirely off his body, Finn had most likely pulled it away, thrashing about in his sleep from his vision. Finn leaned over to him, pushing stray curls off his forehead and tucking the blanket back around his sleeping form.

The hardwood floors were chilly on Finn’s feet as he stood, switching the lamp back off and grabbing Poe’s maroon Gegonia sweater to head downstairs. Out in the hallway he ran his fingers across the wallpaper, tracing the flowery design.

There was something comforting about the mix of modern and Victorian that made up Poe’s house. It felt safe, like it would stand the test of time. The house felt almost immortal, as if it was a fixture that would remain part of the town of Kingsport even after they were gone.

Finn wasn’t yet used to the permanence, but he welcomed it graciously.

Humming a tune he couldn’t quite place, he went about making a cup of Mugwort tea. Through the years Mugwort tea had become Finn’s regular companion. He found it helped his visions to solidify into something he could truly understand.

He settled cross-legged on one of the chairs in the Library, sat his mug on the end table, and began to read.

* * * * * * * * * *

Poe’s heart warmed at the sight of Finn curled in his sweater, BB-8 sitting in his lap as he read one of Poe’s favorite books. He was a sight, his skin dappled with early morning light that seeped through the window. Poe leaned on the doorframe, taking him in for a moment. It made Poe’s heart race every time he remembered, Finn was here now. Every day, he could pull Finn into his arms and kiss him senseless.

“You checking me out again?” Finn said, not looking up from his book.

“How’d you know I was here!?” Poe exclaimed, walking into the room.

Finn laughed and slid a bookmark in place, closing the novel. “I can feel your presence babe, we have a bond and shit.”

“Aww babe,” Poe laughed too, taking a few quick strides over to Finn and flopping into his lap. “That’s so sweet!”

Finn smiled like the sun as he leaned in for a kiss, and of course Poe gave it to him. The day Poe didn’t kiss him at every possible occasion was the day they’d put him in the ground. His lips felt like home, warm and soft and inviting, pulling him in again and again every day like the tide.

“What do you wanna do today?” Finn murmured, running his fingers through Poe’s curls.

Poe shrugged, “I dunno… It’s high time I go out to the store, but I don’t know if I feel like it.”

Finn nodded, pressing his nose to Poe’s temple for a moment before kissing the spot. “Would you feel like it if I came with you? It’s Friday, my practice is closed… I have nothing better to be doing, and you know I’d never pass up an opportunity to spend time with you.”

Poe smiled softly at the thought of Finn trailing along behind him as he cycled into town, the two of them filling up their baskets, maybe stopping for a pastry and some coffee at a local bakery. “I’d love that,” he said, turning to kiss Finn on the lips again. “We can set out in an hour, how’s that sound?”

“Wonderful.” Finn nudged him a little, “now get up so I can make us breakfast. Can’t bike to town on an empty stomach now can we?”

* * * * * * * * * *

The weather was wonderful, the sun shining down on them as a chilled breeze swept through the leaves. Poe’s red flannel shirt flapped behind him as he pedaled at top speed down Violet Hill, his head thrown back with laughter. He felt like a child again.

He thought of Autumn days with his mother, biking down this same hill over and over. Poe always called this Rollercoaster Road, with its twists and turns and the big slope on Violet Hill at the end. He remembered his mother kissing his windswept cheeks and pulling off her own scarf to wrap around his neck. “Go again, mijo,” she would say, her lips pulling into a gentle smile. “You know you want to.” He did. He always did.

The image of his mother in her navy blue peacoat was permanently etched behind his eyes, her deep brown eyes filled to the brim with amusement. Poe would help her rake the leaves in their backyard into one big pile, and then together they’d run through it, jumping and dancing and throwing leaves until it looked as if they had never even raked the leaves in the first place. They’d collapse onto the ground in a pile of giggles, cheeks red and lungs heaving, and his mother would point up at the clouds and say to him, “what do you see, Poe?”

“I see a starship, mami,” He’d respond. “Right there, see? That’s the cockpit, and those are the engines, and it’s got a big long tail with laser guns on the end!”

And his mother would laugh softly, pull him close to her chest and whisper, “you always see starships mijo.”

To Poe, those Autumn days went on forever and ever, until the sun was going down and his father was calling them in for supper, two steaming mugs of spiced apple cider in his hands. He’d cry and scream and beg to stay outside, just five more minutes, but his mother would scoop him up and shush him, kissing his head and promising they’d do it all again tomorrow.

Now that Poe was older and his parents were gone, he spent each Autumn in a nostalgic haze, returning to the spots they had frequented when he was small. The bright fire of the leaves against the grey skies brought a warmth like none other to his heart. A warmth he wanted to share with Finn. He wanted to bring that feeling to him, to see the excitement in his eyes, the childlike wonder that he knew Finn had experienced far too little of.

In that moment Poe vowed to show Finn all the wonderful little joys that Autumn could bring.

End.

Taglist (open) @tinyphantomsalad @waywaychuck @imasunflower00 @shibasus @stormpilotsrus @kitmarloweki @wheeliebinbyers

#finnpoe #stormpilot #star wars #sw #the rise of skywalker #finn/poe #finn #poe dameron #finn/poe dameron #poe dameron/finn #mags' finnpoe chronicles #mags writes #mags' halloween fic

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headfulloffantasy · 4 years

Text

Smile for me

Part 2 of Patch me up

No disclaimers, just mentions of past injuries and a lot of sap ;)

“Nines, can’t you tell me where we’re going?”

“No. It’s gonna be a surprise.” The doctor only smiled as he turned the car off the main road and onto a small gravel path.

“Seriously, I’m starting to feel kidnapped.” Gavin grumbled, but his heart beat in anticipation. It was the first time leaving the hospital since … since that incident with the drug dealers and the fresh summery wind coming into the car through the slightly opened window felt amazing in his hair.

“Maybe I am.” Nines winked at him, causing the Detective’s heart to skip a beat.

“Oh nooo, someone save me,” he replied in a monotonous voice, but with an audible smile.

Nines just threw him a warm glance and reached out to take his partner’s hand, raising it up to his mouth and pressing a quick kiss on the back.

Gavin felt a traitorous blush expand over his face at the tender gesture. He still wasn’t used to someone treating him like Nines did, who somehow managed to be gentle and at the same time didn’t touch him like he was made of glass. The medical was the only person he didn’t feel pitied by and his presence wasn’t making him miserable. When everyone else had tip toed around him, trying to avoid upsetting the injured man, Nines had stayed and told him his honest opinions. And when the Detective’s emotions had boiled over from frustration over being bed-stricken for months, he had fought with him. Gavin still had to smile at the image of the doc dodging the pudding cup flying towards his face, that horrible hospital food hitting the wall and splattering all over the wallpaper. But the most important thing was that he had stayed, even after being attacked with desert. He had held Gavin in his arms as the Detective bawled his eyes out from the constant pain of his healing wounds straining his nerves, he had stayed at the hospital overnight so Gavin wouldn’t be alone, even crawling into that uncomfortably small bed to soothe the nightmares the Detective jolted out of from time to time.

Looking to the side, Gavin let his gaze rest on the man that had sat next to his bed day and night over the last few months, watching over him and talking to Gavin even in his coma. Nines’ voice was the only thing he remembered from those weeks right after the operation. It had been his anchor in that time of fever dreams and blackness.

“Alright, there we are.”

The Detective’s head turned around to look at where they had come to a halt. Outside the car stretched a wide patch of grass before the ground ultimately fell down a small cliff. The setting sun glowed over the horizon, painting the sky a variety of orange and pink colours.

When Gavin turned back and was about to say something, Nines had already left his seat and rummaged around in the trunk of the car. He walked past his partner’s door with an arm full of stuff before stretching out a blanket on top of the cliff and setting down a seemingly heavy basket next to it. Was … was this a picnic? At 9 pm?

The doctor came back and opened the door to the passenger seat where Gavin still sat with big eyes.

“You’re not serious right now, are you?”

Nines just laughed and reached down to put one arm beneath his former patient’s knees, the other behind his back. Right. Being carried always was a grim reminder that Gavin still wasn’t strong enough to walk on his own, but as soon as he was lifted out of the car, he felt a pair of lips on his temple.

“Stop frowning. You will be able to do everything on your own in a few months.”

The Detective held onto his partner’s neck and threw him an annoyed look while Nines pushed the door close with his elbow.

“You a mind reader now?”

“No, just know you enough to guess what that pout means.”

Gavin hid the small twitch around the edges of his mouth by leaning over Nines’ shoulder as he was carried to the blanket. On one side it felt great to be held by those strong arms, but on the other it always brought home the fact that the Detective himself felt like he wasn’t able to lift more than a penny. Even earlier, when the doctor had picked Gavin up from his room with a wheelchair, it had made him uncomfortable.

Nines set him down before slipping behind him.

“I just hate how weak I am at the moment.”

“Gosh, you must be the most impatient patient I’ve ever had,” the medical chuckled behind him, a warm sound rumbling from his chest while he opened the basket to pull out some candles. Gavin watched as he lit them with a small lighter.

“I’m a Detective, I can’t stand being useless.”

Nines put down the last candle around the blanket, the expression on his face turning serious all of a sudden when he looked up at his partner.

“You’re not useless, Gavin. Goddammit, you barely escaped death. It’s normal for that to take a while to heal.”

The doctor’s eyes fell to Gavin’s stomach where he knew to be band aids under a loose shirt, covering slowly healing bullet wounds and the cuts of the operation he had performed himself. The Detective’s stomach contracted at the thought of how he must have looked that night. He himself hadn’t witnessed a lot of it, but he knew that it had been Nines sewing him back together. By now his broken ribs had grown together again, but he still earned several scars and a metal plate on the back of his skull as it had been cracked like a nut. A pierced lung, internal bleeding and an abdominal trauma. All those horrors reflected in Nines’ eyes as he stared at his lover’s body, reminding Gavin that he hadn’t been the only one suffering. In Nines place, he would have gone crazy.

“I know.” The Detective skidded closer and intertwined their fingers. “Thanks to you. Without you, I wouldn’t be here anymore.”

Those ice blue eyes jumped up to his, filled with anxiety, while he leaned his forehead against the doctor’s.

“I don’t know what I would have done if you had died under my hands,” Nines whispered.

“Stop thinking about it. You saved me, Nines. In more than one way. I owe you my life.”

Gavin closed the space between them and laid his lips on his lover’s as gentle as possible. The touch was soft and reassuring, conveying everything the Detective didn’t find the words for. When they leaned back, both of them wore a small smile.

“So, will you tell me what all of this is?” Gavin asked and gestured towards the basket and the candles.

“I still owed you a date, didn’t I?” Nines smirked at him as Gavin settled between his legs, back leaned against the medical’s chest.

“You don’t owe me shit, Nines,” the Detective replied, pressing a quick kiss to his partner’s cheek though without trying to hide his happiness.

“I promised you and I will keep that promise.”

Gavin turned his face upwards. “How did you even convince the other doc to let me go outside? He said I wasn’t allowed to leave for another week minimum.”

“Well, this doc says otherwise.” He placed a kiss on the bridge of Gavin’s nose, right on top of the old scar. “You could call it a special authorisation. I pulled a few strings because I thought it would be good for you to get outside for a bit. And I am here, should anything happen.”

The Detective nodded at that and directed his gaze back on the setting sun which set the sky on fire, Detroit’s outline standing out black from the colour fest. The view was incredible.

His attention was caught when he heard Nines pulling out stuff from the basket. Cutlery, grapes, some cheese and salad, several sauces and baguette appeared and were arranged next to them.

A warm feeling spread in Gavin’s chest and stretched out into his stomach at the thought of Nines planning this for him. An evening picnic under the open sky, with candles and food while watching the sunset, just them alone on a cliff. A breeze ruffled through the Detective’s hair, warm and pleasant despite the cooling evening air around them. He couldn’t have been happier right now.

“Thank you.”

“Hm?” The doctor turned towards him.

“Thank you. For this. For everything you do for me.”

Nines gaze softened at those words and he wrapped his arms tightly around the Detective’s torso.

“Of course. Always.” While pressing a small kiss to Gavin’s neck and nuzzling his nose behind the man’s ear, he reached for something still lying in the basket. He pulled out a silver thermos bottle and put it into his lover’s hands. “Don’t tell the medical staff I gave this to you.”

The Detective looked down at the jug between his fingers. “What is it?”

“Open it.”

“Uh, more surprises I guess,” Gavin sighed, feeling the lips on his skin turn up into a smirk.

The moment he unscrewed the cap, the smell of freshly brewed coffee was released into the air, steam rising from the hot beverage.

“Is-is that coffee?” The disbelief in his voice made Nines chuckle behind him and the arms around him tightened.

“Thought you would appreciate a cup after only getting that lukewarm swill at the hospital every now and then.”

Gavin was speechless as he stared at the can on his lap, eliciting another wave of warmth washing over him. Never before had anyone listened to him as intently as Nines did. The man even remembered his favourite brand of coffee beans, the smell was unmistakable the strong brew only the Detective seemed to enjoy.

“You remembered.”

“Couldn’t forget my boyfriend’s favourite brand of coffee, could I?”

That made Gavin stop in his motion for a second.

“Sorry, was that too much?”

The Detective hated how insecure and worried Nines’ voice sounded, making him quickly shake his head.

“No, I was just a little overwhelmed. I guess you’re the first person to refer to me as his boyfriend.”

Tilting his head back and turning his face up towards the other with a wide smile, Gavin leaned back into the embrace.

Nines looked down at him, the emotions swimming in his eyes almost causing the Detective’s heart to stop.

“Gosh, did I miss that smile.”

Gavin didn’t know how he had enough sense left to put the lid back onto the can and place it aside before pulling Nines down into a kiss and crashing their mouths together, but apparently he had. One hand was interlaced with Nines’, the fingers of the other tangled in that dark soft hair. He deepened the kiss through pulling the man’s head closer as their lips moved over each other in an intense rhythm and he felt a thumb caressing his jaw. Eagerly opening his mouth, the Detective let his partner’s tongue enter while his own started to explore. God did Nines taste sweet.

With a swift move, Gavin pulled back and turned around before attacking Nines’ lips once more, this time pressing his chest to the medical’s and hitting him with enough impact to make him fall back. The Detective crawled on top of his boyfriend’s torso without stopping to kiss him hungrily, elbows set down to each side of Nines’ head and hands buried in his hair. His tongue had conquered the man’s mouth as he couldn’t get enough of that taste, a row of sharp teeth in the front and warm wetness at the back. Nines’ scent lulled him in, one that always managed to calm Gavin down and he knew he couldn’t fall asleep without anymore. The doctor’s hands roamed over his back, drawing gentle patterns on top of his boyfriend’s shirt and pulling him closer to press their bodies together.

When Gavin finally managed to break away from the other’s soft lips, they were both panting heavily.

“I am so grateful for you,” the Detective whispered breathless, still close to Nines’ face with their noses touching. The other man looked so beautiful in front of him. Shiny, kiss swollen lips, a soft gaze in those silver-blue eyes, ruffled strands of dark hair falling into his forehead. The candlelight and last rays of the sun danced over his pale skin, giving it a warm glow.

“I love you,” Nines breathed against Gavin’s lips before catching them with his own in a slow tender kiss while the first stars of the night appeared above them on the darkening sky.

#reed900 #gavinreed #nines rk900 #dbh #sweet sweet fluff #making up for yesterday #happy end

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setepenre-set · 5 years

Text

Code: Safeword (chapter 28)

Pairing: Megamind/Roxanne

Rating: M (for sexual content and language)

Roxanne calls time-out on Metro Man Day, interrupting Megamind’s Death Ray plot before it even begins. Her original plan is a single, casual hook-up with her annoyingly attractive supervillain. But Megamind, Roxanne comes to realize, matters to her a lot more than she would care to admit—and she also comes to realize that he’s not really very happy as a supervillain. Clearly, it’s time for Roxanne to come up with another plan…

AO3 | FFN | chapter 27

static.

static like snow; static that becomes snow, becomes—

—snow silhouetted against the jagged slice of city sky between the brick walls of an alleyway that stretch impossibly high into

the sky

bright and dark at the same time, dark with night and bright with light pollution, and the snow

f a l l i n g

to mix with the dirty grey drifts already melting into filthy black water, puddles and rivulets shining like spilled ink, spilled oil

(the colors of everything so strangely distorted that it takes a moment to recognize the dark stain slowly swirling and spreading in the black water as blood)

colors wrong, angles wrong, and a siren wails like a distant scream and

he steps into the mouth of the alleyway and fills up the world.

blue skin washed greyish and un-vivid from the color distortion, blue hands and blue face and wide, wary green eyes

young, so young, heartbreakingly young, the face lacking the black line of facial hair, lacking the shadows beneath the eyes and the hollows beneath the sharp cheekbones that fourteen years of time and supervillainy will carve there.

The sweater he's wearing—orange, but, like his skin, dulled by the distortion of the colors—is far too big for him, the hem reaching down halfway to his knees, the sleeves covering most of his hands, just his fingertips visible, clutching the edges of the material, restless movement and bitten nails and chipped black polish.

The siren screams again in the distance, and a low, rumbling, grating noise joins the sound, discordant and threatening, as the thing that's bleeding out in the alleyway sets eyes on him and growls low in its throat.

Megamind glances down, goes still, the expression in his eyes suddenly more wounded than wary.

(the siren screams in the distance and the snow falls silently around them)

Megamind moves forward, slow, unthreatening, fingers uncurling from his sleeves as he holds out empty palms

/ it's all right; I'm not going to hurt you /

(voice soft, words as warped as the colors, like something heard in a dream, a language you don't speak but can somehow just barely comprehend, just for as long as the dream lasts)

The discordant growl increases in volume, a sharper edge to the threat. Megamind crouches down on the ground beside the growing pool of blood and dirty water and slowly reaches out.

The thing in the alley reacts with the vicious desperation of the dying, a blur of claws and pain and anger. A sharply in-drawn breath—and when Megamind pulls his hand back again, he's bleeding, too.

A clatter of noise—metal and weight—at the mouth of the alley, and, without rising, Megamind looks over his shoulder at the hulking robotic form now silhouetted in the alleyway mouth.

(the siren screams, closer now, and the creature in the alley growls its defensive threat.)

/ sir we need to get out of here / Minion says

/ it's a cat, Minion / Megamind says, still kneeling, dirty water seeping into the knees of the jeans he's wearing.

/ yes, sir / Minion says, distraction in his voice, half-turned inside the glass headpiece of his suit, looking behind them.

/ somebody hurt it /

/ yes, sir / Minion says again. / now leave it alone; we have to go /

(the snow falls, silent and uncaring. Megamind makes no move to rise.)

/ it's hurt / he says.

/ it's dying / Minion says, turning in the headpiece to look at Megamind again, voice gentle but firm. / and I'm sorry about that, but there's nothing you can do /

(a drop of blood slides from Megamind's hand to mix with the blood and water already swirling together on the ground.)

The siren is louder, now, closer, and the growl from the dying cat is weaker and

(the edges of the picture start to go dark, burning away like paper set to flame, until only the face remains and—)

The blue lips press together in a hard line and the black brows snap down and together and the supervillain that fourteen years of time will make him suddenly flashes in his face.

/ watch me. / he says.

(—a gun in his hand and a glowing pulse of—

bluewhitelightning

and then—

static.

—static threading through a series of confused images and sounds—hands and eyes, darkness and bright flashes of light, noise and silence and—

A face, blue, flickering into view, the image stabilizing into—

/ there you are / Megamind says, voice as soft as his expression. / there; you're awake now; everything's okay /

He smiles and reaches out to stroke the glass carapace of the brainbot.

(green text scrolling, superimposed over the image of Megamind smiling)

[ /brainbot consciousness program : successfully installed ]

[ carapace control : optimal function ] [ limb control : optimal

function ] [ flight control : optimal function ] [ sensors : optimal

function ]

[ visual input : /facial recognition ]

[ designation : daddy ( megamind ) ]

_program 1_

_daddy loves you

_protocol 1_

A_commands / directives / requests of designation: daddy

( megamind ) are to be obeyed at own discretion

_protocol 2_

—the code flickers, then the image, seeming almost to loop, to repeat. Again: Megamind's face, leaning over, flickering into view, the same expression of soft worry and wonder mixed together.

But it's not the same image; he's got a bruise on his cheekbone and a band-aid on one temple and there's another brainbot hovering over his shoulder, looking down—the clip shudders slightly, the view shifting to that of the hovering brainbot, looking down at the one that's on the table, waking up.

"There," Megamind says, "there, you—"

A horrible screeching sound, and the bot on the table thrashes wildly, eyestalk whipping around, the shutter open wide; robotic limbs waving, metal claws opening and closing, slamming down on the table. The jagged-toothed jaws snap in the air, and then close sharply over Megamind's wrist.

Megamind's breath hisses through his teeth, and his face goes a shade paler as the brainbot on his shoulder swoops down and wraps its own metallic limbs around the other bot.

Even as it does so, the bot on the table is already releasing Megamind's hand. It shudders and falls back on the table, the shutters of its eyepiece blinking rapidly as it makes a distressed, keening kind of noise. It shrinks back from the other bot, who chatters threateningly at it before releasing it.

"It's okay!" Megamind says. "Zero, it's—it's okay; they didn't mean to."

Zero swoops over again to Megamind, hovering around him, practically vibrating in the air. The bot on the table makes a miserable, mechanical noise and inches forward to Megamind. Zero's makes a kind of hissing noise at it and it goes still again.

"It's okay," Megamind repeats.

He clutches his wounded arm close to his chest, uninjured hand wrapped tightly around his wrist. Even so, he's bleeding, an alarming amount of blood seeping from beneath his fingers, turning the sleeve of the shirt he's wearing red.

"Zero," he says calmly, "why don't you go tell Uncle Minion to bring the first aid kit?"

Another shudder as the point of view flips again, the bot on the table watching Zero fly quickly away, looking up at Megamind.

He smiles at them reassuringly.

"Hey," he says. "Hey, it's okay, Spikeless. It was just an accident; you just got scared. It's going to be okay. Daddy's not mad at you."

"…bowg?"

The noise is much smaller and much more uncertain than the sounds the brainbots usually make. Megamind smiles again.

"Promise," he says. "Daddy's not mad at you. Daddy loves you. It's okay. It's—"

He glances over his shoulder as Minion, accompanied by Zero and a small cloud of brainbots, burst into the room.

The picture wavers, warps, turns into—

—static. static threading through video clips, through—

—Megamind dancing, laughing, while the brainbots fly around him in a cloud—

—Megamind putting up floral wallpaper in a kitchen while he sings along to the radio, then a flash of him dramatically revealing the wallpapered kitchen to an open-mouthed Minion—

—Megamind throwing a wrench in his workshop, playing fetch with the brainbots—

—Megamind sitting on a couch, watching a baseball game, dressed in a well-worn a Metro City Wolverines shirt. A brainbot—Zero—is lying on his arm, shutter of her eyepiece half-closed. Megamind grimaces and starts to shift in his seat and Zero cracks open the shutter of her eyepiece and fixes him with a pointed stare. Megamind sighs and resettles back in the same position, reaching up with his free hand to stroke over Zero's glass braincase. The electricity inside crackles, arcing up to his fingertips, and Zero makes a contented, mechanical humming sound and her eyepiece closes—halfway—then the rest of the way, blinking to-

darkness

which becomes—

—black boots, seen between through a horizontal crack made between the floor and a mattress, an entire group of brainbots huddled together beneath the bed, lightning crackling excitedly in their braincases and

"Oh, I just can't find my bots!"Megamind says, voice slightly too loud, the words exaggerated even more than usual.

One bot shifts slightly, snaking its eyestalk forward to get a better view—this isn't exactly a quiet maneuver, as many of the other bots try to hold it back, afraid, no doubt, of it giving away their hiding place. Megamind, only a foot away, does not even glance over at the source of the noise.

The underside of his bed is filled with so many brainbots that the mattress is bulging upwards, but Megamind appears not to notice this. He proceeds, instead, to look in the most elaborately ridiculous places possible–under the rug, inside a book, in his glass of water by the bedside table.

The brainbots can scarcely contain their glee.

"I can't imagine where they could be!" Megamind says, throwing his arms up as if in frustration.

He glances over at his bed, which is now vibrating with excitement. For a moment, his lips twitch, and then he schools his expression into one of overdramatic disappointment and exhaustion.

"I've been looking for such a long time!" he says, and heaves a sigh. "Maybe I should sit down here and take a break!"

He throws himself onto the bed, and sits there in an attitude of defeat, his head in his hand. The mattress wriggles beneath him. One bot gives a faint bowg of delight before the others shush them.

"I'm so tired," Megamind says, "maybe I should take a nap!"

He flops back onto the mattress; almost all of the brainbots bowg this time, the sound rippling through the group of them like infectious laughter through a group of giggling children.

"Or maybe," Megamind pauses theatrically, "maybe I should…JUMP ON THE BED!"

He leaps up onto his feet, cackling, as the brainbots explode from beneath the bed, all of them bowging loudly, their braincases crackling with excitement. Megamind almost overbalances at the sudden shift of the mattress beneath him, but they catch him as they swarm around him.

They lift him briefly into the air, then let him go; his feet hit the mattress and he bounces up again.

"Oh, there you are! There you are!" he cries, "There's Daddy's clever little cyborgs! I found you!"

"BOWG!

"BOWG BOWG!"

"BOWG! BOWG! BOWG!"

The bots swoop and dart excitedly around him and Megamind bounces, breathless with laughter and

The image shifts, sound distorts into—

—darkness and sirens and another alleyway, and someone running, their feet slamming rapidly on the ground, their breath coming in harsh gasps, someone running around a corner and stumbling into the mouth of the alleyway.

A kid, clearly, silhouetted there against the electric light, wide, terrified eyes visible between the hoodie pulled up over their head and the bandanna wrapped around the lower part of their face. They're carrying a box with a picture of a television set on it, which is nearly half their size, clutching it tightly even as they pant for breath and careen down the alley towards the shadows.

From one of these shadows a black gloved hand seizes the kid's hoodie, hauls them backward into the dark.

The kid gives a half-strangled cry of alarm, eyes going even wider and more terrified, and a second black-gloved hand comes down over the bandanna-covered mouth.

In the darkness behind the dumpster, looking down at the kid, is Megamind.

He's young, still, but older than he was in that first alley, still lacking the facial hair, but the first shadows have appeared around his eyes. His cheekbones are sharper, everything about him more angular, more focused.

It's early enough in his career that he doesn't look exactly like a supervillain yet—a spike-shouldered leather jacket instead of a cape, boots that lace instead of buckle, only the de-gun holstered at his thigh, the lightning bolt emblem picked out in silver and deep blue on the black shirt he has on to hint at the costume he'll wear in the future.

The kid stares up at him, whites showing all around his eyes. Megamind slowly releases him, steps back from him. Raises a finger to his lips, motioning to the kid to be silent, to stay where he is.

The kid stares at him for a long moment—nods, jerky and frantic.

Megamind takes another step back, into the alleyway, into the light, leaving the kid hidden in the shadows.

He smiles, sharp and fast and sudden. The electricity from the hovering brainbot flickers over his face. He draws the de-gun from the holster, smooth and easy, twirls it over one finger, winks at the kid—

and takes off running towards the direction of the sirens, laughing, laughter that leaps and burns, like a torch, like a chemical reaction, like a city on fire.

A shift in the perspective, black sky becoming blacktop pavement becoming—

—a school playground, seen at sunset, the dusk painting long black shadows on the cracked blacktop pavement, the shapes stretched, distorted, alien, The sound of rusty chains creaking, creaking, creaking, as one shadow shape slowly moves—forward, backward, forward, backward.

The perspective shifts again, turning away from the shadows to what's casting them. Red-gold sunlight dazzles, the figures silhouetted against the light, almost as dark and alien as their shadows. Until the image resolves itself into a swing set, and three people sitting on the swings, side by side.

This is a more recent piece of footage; the heavy leather mantle, and the years, sit clearly on his shoulders.

The girls wear ill-fitting school uniforms, and the oldest looks over at Megamind, a sharp cutting sideways glance, direct and almost challenging. The younger girl's expression is strangely unreadable—not vacant by any means, but somehow blank.

It is this girl, the younger one, who pushes her swing back and forth with one dangling foot, creating that rhythmic creak creak creak.

"Didn't think you'd really come," the older girl says, tone as sharp as the glance she fixes on Megamind.

Megamind hums a noncommittal noise and wraps one black-gloved hand around one of the chains holding up his swing. A brainbot swoops silently to hover above his shoulder and the girl scowls at him.

"Latoya," he says, "isn't it?"

"That's right," the girl says, still glaring. "And this is Kendra."

"It's very nice to meet you, Kendra. Latoya." Megamind glances at the younger girl, then looks away again, begins to push his own swing back and forth with one black-booted foot, matching the rhythm of Kendra's movement.

Latoya looks, if possible, more inclined than ever to go for his throat.

"What is it you need?" Megamind asks, voice soft, carefully casual, eyes fixed on the sky, slowly darkening beyond the twisted metal shape of the jungle gym.

Latoya's face darkens, and, for a moment, she looks much older than she can possibly be, mouth bracketed by deep lines, eyes less angry than they are hopeless. She opens her mouth, and—

"Are you going to take us away?"

Megamind and Latoya both glance over at Kendra, Megamind's expression surprised, Latoya's concerned.

"Take you away?" Megamind repeats, tilting his head, looking at the girl.

Kendra looks at him, gaze sliding over his forehead, his jaw, finally settling on his left ear, eyes never quite meeting his. After a beat, Megamind shifts his own gaze to the air slightly to one side of Kendra's face.

"That's what our mama says," Kendra says. "She says if you're bad, Megamind is gonna come and take you away."

Megamind's expression does something fast and complicated—a flicker of something deep and desolate in his eyes, quickly covered with a swift blink and the arch of one eyebrow.

"Ah," he says, "well—"

"I'm bad," Kendra continues, tone unchanged, "I'd like you to take me away, but only if you take Latoya, too."

Megamind's eyebrows draw together.

"Bad," he says. "who told you that you were bad, Kendra?"

"Everybody," Kendra says, still in that same matter-of-fact, conversational tone, still pushing her swing back and forth, back and forth. "Step-daddy, and mama, and Auntie Melanie, and Mrs. Peterson. Step-daddy especially. It makes him mad. What's your favorite dinosaur?"

Megamind's eyelids flicker briefly in surprise.

"Kendra—" Latoya says quickly, "we talked about this, remember? The Overlord doesn't want to talk about—"

"Brontosarus," Megamind says.

Kendra frowns, still moving the swing back and forth, back and forth."That's not its real name," she says. "It's Apatosaurus; the—"

"Kendra," Latoya hisses.

Megamind laughs.

"No, she's right," he says. "I was so disappointed when I found out, I refused to read any books about dinosaurs for months. I still hold out hope that they'll change their minds after all. I like pterodactyls, too."

Kendra makes a face.

"Those aren't even dinosaurs," she says. "They're pterosaurs."

"Kendra!" Latoya says again, sounding somewhere between mortified and angry at Kendra deciding to correct a superviillain.

Megamind laughs again.

"You," he says, "are clearly a stickler for correct terminology. I feel like I'm trying to menace Miss Ritchi with an incorrectly labeled dinosaur-bot." His voice trails off slightly at the end of the sentence, a thoughtful, considering kind of look coming into his eyes.

"I like her," Kendra says. "She's smart and she has pretty hair."

"Yes," Megamind says absently, a faraway, planning-out-future-deathtraps look still in his eyes.

"You should ask her."

Megamind comes back to himself with a little jerk.

"Sorry—what?" he says.

"You should ask her," Kendra repeats.

Megamind's eyelids flicker, lashes giving a flutter, uncertain, like moth wings.

(for a moment it seems that a slight purple flush lights up his cheekbones, but that may be just a trick of the dying light.)

"Sorry," he says again, "ah—ask—ask her what?"

"What her favorite dinosaur is."

Megamind relaxes infinitesimally, fingers loosening around the chain supporting the swing, and he smiles, quick and crooked like a flash of lightning.

"I'm not really sure how I would work that into an evil monologue," he says.

Kendra makes a face which indicates she is not particularly impressed with this excuse.

"You just—"

"Kendra," Latoya says, voice rising, sharpening. "Why don't you take one of the brainbots and show it how long you can hang upside down for?"

Kendra stands up, letting go of her swing to turn towards the brainbot above Megamind's shoulder.

"I'm good at upside down," she says.

The brainbot turns its eyepiece towards Megamind, as if in question. Megamind gives a tiny nod and it bowgs enthusiastically and swoops over to the jungle gym. Kendra follows, leaving her now empty swing dangling. It swings erratically for a long moment before Latoya reaches out and grabs it, holding it still.

"Thanks," she says, her other hand balled into a fist in her lap. "Lonnie—the dinosaur thing—you didn't have to let her talk like that."

"Lonnie," Megamind says, looking directly at Latoya. "That's your stepdad?"

"Kendra's stepdad," Latoya says. "Lonnie's my real dad."

Her lips flatten out, a spark of anger appearing in her eyes.

"It's bad," Megamind says, a statement, not a question, but Latoya jerks her head in affirmation anyway. "You want to tell me what kind of bad?"

Both of Latoya's hands curl into fists in her lap. She looks out across the cracked pavement of the playground to where Kendra is dangling upside down—not from the jungle gym, but from the carapace of the very excited brainbot.

"I tell you—and you're probably gonna say you don't got it that bad," she says, but she glances at Megamind sidelong with something like hope in her face.

Megamind, looking out over the playground at Kendra, presses his lips briefly together.

"If you're bad, Megamind will come and take you away," he repeats Kendra's words softly before letting his lips curl into something that's not really very much like a smile. "I don't think people who don't have it that bad regularly request help from boogeymen. Or supervillains."

Latoya takes a sharp breath through her nose.

"He doesn't hit us, really," she says, "just—he yells at her and tells her she's stupid and—and she's not, she just doesn't—she has trouble focusing on—on normal stuff, and he hates that she can't look at him straight, and he calls her—he calls her a retard, just like those shits at school, and when she gets mad and fights back, she gets in trouble and he tells her she's bad and her mom doesn't stand up to him at all; she doesn't defend her, she just sits there and agrees—"

Latoya cuts herself off with gritted teeth, tears sheening her eyes. She looks away again, out across the playground, and swipes a hand viciously across her eyes.

"You, too?" Megamind asks.

Latoya turns and looks at him again, confusion in her face.

"They treat you like that, too?" he asks.

Latoya gives a one-shouldered shrug, jerky and dismissive.

"Yeah, I guess," she says, "I just know how to, you know, keep out of his way, and Kendra can't."

Megamind nods, mouth compressed into a flat line.

"What do you need me to do?"

Latoya uncurls her hands, flexes the fingers, wraps them tightly around the chains of her swing.

"I want to get her away from him—from both of them; all of them," she says. "You take her away and you take me, too; Kendra and me stay together. Yeah?"

She looks sharply at Megamind, fear just below the surface of the challenge in her eyes. He nods—understanding and agreement, and Latoya relaxes a visible fraction. Only a fraction, though; her gaze is still wary—and expectant. She watches Megamind for a long moment, as if waiting for him to say something more. She presses her lips together.

"Well?" she says.

Megamind tips his head, eyebrows drawing together.

"Well, what?"

"Well, what do I owe you?"

Megamind blinks.

"Owe me?"

Latoya rolls her eyes.

"Yeah, owe you," she says. "Everybody knows how it works when you ask the Overlord for help. I wanna know what I owe you."

Megamind's lips quirk sideways—for a split second the expression looks almost bitter, and then his mouth twists up into a wryly amused smirk instead.

"Ah," he says. "Yes. Of course. Well—shall we say—a small favor, to be redeemed at a later date?"

He raises his eyebrows interrogatively, but Latoya is already shaking her head.

"Uh-uh," she says. "I wanna know what I owe up front. None of that 'favors to be redeemed at a later date' bullshit. That's how you get into trouble."

Megamind's eyebrows rise a half-inch higher.

"I…see," he says. "Well."

He shifts his gaze out to the rest of the playground. Kendra is still hanging determinedly upside-down from the carapace of the brainbot, who is now swooping around with her in slow circles, but Megamind, his gaze unfocused and his expression faraway, doesn't seem to be watching them play.

After a few heartbeats of silence, Megamind blinks, glances over at Latoya, eyes sharp again.

"I'm going to send you and Kendra to the Metro City Children's Home—don't look so skeptical; the facility is under my protection, and the brainbots closely monitor all of the staff, volunteers, and children. If you don't approve once you're there, you can flag down a bot and you will be moved—no additional favors as payment required. All right?"

"All right," Latoya says. "And? What about this favor, then?"

"There's a boy," Megamind says, eyes on her face, expression completely serious, "at the Home. His name is Darius. I want you to be his friend."

"…that's it?" Latoya asks, voice and expression incredulous. "Just—be this kid's friend?"

"Yes."

"Why?"

"Because he doesn't have any."

She narrows her eyes.

"What's wrong with him?"

"Nothing's wrong with him," Megamind says sharply. "He just has difficulty making friends, that's all. Like Kendra."

Latoya, mouth open to reply, pauses, lips pressing together again.

"He's like Kendra?" she asks after a moment.

"Yes."

"…does he have a thing about dinosaurs, too?"

"Currently, I think his main area of interest is Ancient Egypt," Megamind says. "But dinosaurs are almost always an appropriate topic of conversation. Evil monologues aside. Do we have a deal?"

Latoya blows out a breath.

"Yeah, okay," she says. "Guess I'll start reading up on mummies and shit."

"Excellent," Megamind says, "so—"

His voice fades out as the camera angle changes, the brainbot filming swooping up and into the air, then towards the setting sun, which flares orange momentarily and—

static. static.

static and

silence.

silence like the

—humming of a large machine, audible in the background, and Megamind sitting at the console in the Lair, chin propped up in one hand, the array of computer screens looming on the wall above him. He's holding a white drafting pencil in his other hand, sketching in the corner of a blueprint for a giant robot.

Across the screens above him, a program runs, greenish illumination from the computer screens flickering over him like ripples of underwater light. Beneath Megamind's hand, a tiny, detailed flower takes shape—stamens, pistons, petals, stem. Above him, strings of numbers and equations scroll—followed by what is clearly a list of financial transactions.

[ /autopay_annual ] [ donation recipients : metro city public library / metro city children's home / metro city charity hospital / classy seconds thrift store...

In front of the screens, Megamind sketches the flower—cross sections and an exploded diagram, as meticulously rendered as the plans for the machine that take up most of the page, and then a sketch of a flower itself, a single blossom on a long stem.

[ /autopay_annual ] [ donations received ] [ autopay_annual : program complete ] [ autopay_single donations : 2003 ] [ donation recipients: …

the numbers blur and fade and once more there is

static and

"—though, does she never change the batteries on any of these?"

Megamind's voice, and then Megamind himself, holding a screwdriver and looking up—up at the ceiling, where he has the top cover of a smoke detector flipped open. Beyond him, and the stepladder he's standing on, Minion is carrying an unconscious Roxanne towards the doors of her balcony. One of the brainbots accompanying him opens the door for Minion, as Megamind, still muttering to himself, swiftly changes the batteries on the smoke detector.

"—fire safety is really not optional; that woman has the most badly developed sense of self preservation that I have ever encountered; 'oh, I'm Roxanne Ritchi; I don't need to worry about giant lasers or supervillains or common household accidents, oh no. I'm—"

—a click as he flips the cover of the smoke detector on once more, the screen going dark as his voice cuts off into—

darkness and

"—don't try to lie to me any more. It's a terrible waste of my time."

Megamind's voice again in the darkness, but the tone completely different—silky and soft and somehow dangerous, even through the crackle of static that covers the response of whoever he's talking to.

The static, the darkness, recede—into a darkened room with an immense window looking out over the nightscape of the city. Megamind is nearly a silhouette, a black shadow limned in the glow from the city lights, jagged edges of skyscrapers at his back, green eyes oddly luminous. He shifts very slightly, and the light falls on the sharp line of his cheekbone; glints on the spikes on his shoulders, the flash of his teeth.

"I see," he says, "Well. I do hope you and your friends had fun with it, because you're not going to be having any more fun for quite some time. I will cover the missing money, the charity hospital will go ahead as planned, on schedule, and with no more 'unexpected costs', and you and your friends will all owe me, along with the money, several extremely large favors. I expect you to give me all of the names of everyone involved in this little venture of yours—and I do mean all and everyone. Don't go thinking you can deceive me on that account; you're not nearly smart enough, for one thing, and for another, you're certainly not going to be my only source for this information. This is—"

—darkness and silence washes in again, the city lights fading out into

the city

made of light—

"—the map of Metrocity, showing the the lines of territory—the current lines of territory, I said," Megamind, beside the holographic projection, holds up a quelling hand and sends a stern glance around the other occupants of the room, "we are not here to discuss or debate the proper allocation of territories; you'll all have your chance of that next challenge day."

He pauses, and then, evidently satisfied at the lack of argument, gestures at the holographic map.

"So. What we are here to discuss is the areas of each territory which will be affected during the upcoming battle with Metro Man. These—" he gestures again, and numerous parts of the map light up bright and blue, "—are the targets which, following your requests, I have scheduled for destruction; I'll be meeting with each gang individually to finalize the plans for reconstruction and repurposing. I'll also be needing a plan for relocation and evacuation from each of you. Included in the plans should be your budget requests for both the relocation/evacuation and the reconstruction/repurposing stages. All of you should—"

—holographic lights flaring, blurring, drowning in a snowy burst of static, then

( fli cker ing ) ( fl icker ing )

( flickering )

back into view again, the same city made of light, seen from a different angle, projected in a different place. Megamind

standing

in the middle of the city that glows in the middle of the darkened Lair

Megamind

—wearing that orange sweater, faded by age and wear, now, rather than color distortion. Arms, and a ragged red and black plaid blanket wrapped around his body, a fine, continuous shiver running through him, breath visible in white -white holographic light limns his face like frost.

"—really sure, Minion," he says, and the shiver runs through his voice as well, "I watched Lady Doppler try to shift the storm; I could taste the ozone; she wasn't faking. It just didn't work."

"So…" Minion says. "the blizzard—"

"Is not natural," Megamind says grimly. "And it's only going to get worse."

"This is an attack," Minion says. "You think it's us they're targeting? Or Metro Man?"

"I don't care," Megamind says, almost snarls.

He whirls on his heel, the blanket flaring behind him like a moth-eaten cape, and begins to pace through the hologram of the city, wading through light like luminous water.

"They come into my city, no contacting me for permission before launching an attack, no regard for my authority as the reigning supervillain of Metrocity, no attention to my established rules for acceptable villainous behavior—I don't care if they're aiming for Metro Man, the disrespect alone qualifies it as hostile to us! But that's—we'll deal with that; we'll deal with whoever it is later; that's not the point, Minion!"

"Sir?"

Megamind gives a hissing sound of frustration, crosses with swift strides to a nearby console.

"Look," he says, and flips a switch. "The worst of the blizzard is going to hit Metrocity in two days—"

Above the holographic city, the image of a swirling white vortex of light appears, rotating slowly in place. Megamind resumes pacing as it gradually lowers until it is superimposed over the luminous buildings and streets, all but blotting out their light with its own.

"—and everything Lady Doppler could sense, everything that all of the weather-monitoring satellites I've hacked into say—it's going to stay here, Minion, it's going to stay in Metrocity, for an impossible-to-predict amount of time. And considering the pattern of the way the storm started in the first place, it's only going to get worse—rapidly, exponentially worse."

He steps back into the sea of light as the vortex glows brighter yet.

"People are going to die, Minion," he says. "We can mobilize the brainbots to evacuate the streets, maybe even the lower-income housing areas, where the utilities are most likely to break down first. There's not enough sufficiently safe room for that volume of people, but we could approve the use of mass dehydration—which would be a nightmare to try to deal with afterwards—but."

He hitches the blanket up tighter around his shoulders, rubs at his eyes, at the dark circles beneath them, blue-purple marks of sleeplessness and several-days-old eyeliner.

"But what, Sir?"

Megamind takes his hand from his face, eyeliner on his fingertips, smudged even worse around his eyes. He looks at the city, spread out around him in lines of light.

"I told you, Minion," he says bleakly. "The storm is going to stay. And it's only going to get worse. The first evacuation areas—those are just the sections of the city likely to break down first. If the storm stays as long as I think it's going to, the rest of the city is eventually going to go as well. Bit by bit. Water lines freezing. Power lines going down. Everywhere."

He looks up at Minion again, eyes wide, holographic light shimmering across them like the sheen of tears. Blue fingers twist in the fabric of the blanket he's wearing, and suddenly he looks as young as the Megamind who stood in a snowy alleyway reaching for a dying cat.

"I—I can't dehydrate everyone in the city, Minion," he says, sounding lost. "I—" he scrubs a hand over his face again, quick, harsh, sudden. "—well, I could, I suppose," he says, a bitter laugh edging the words, "but that's Plan Z, or possibly Plan Z Minus, because the League of Heroes really would come after me, then, not to mention Metro Man, who I'm sure would absolutely believe that the storm wasn't my fault, and definitely buy that I wanted to dehydrate the entire population of Metrocity for purely altruistic reasons."

He begins to pace again, the restless, feverish movements of a half-delirious wild animal in a too-small cage.

"Sir," Minion says softly, "you know the city—they do have an official superhero, not to mention emergency services. This isn't really your responsibility."

Megamind whirls on him, green eyes blazing in his gaunt face like poison fire.

"Yes, it is."

Minion opens his mouth to reply, then sighs and shakes his head.

"Do you…have a Plan A, Sir?" he asks.

"Not yet."

Megamind turns away to look out across the sea of holographic light again, the line of his shoulders sharp and tense beneath the blanket draped over them.

"But I will."

Minion sighs again.

"Right," he says. "Well. I'm going to go make some coffee."

Megamind doesn't answer, and after a moment, Minion turns away, leaving him there.

The brainbot filming moves closer to him, silent for once, subdued as it hovers gently at his shoulder.

Megamind, face in profile, glares fiercely down at the city, brow furrowed, lips pressed tightly together in a down-turned line. For nearly a minute, he simply stands there, silent, unmoving, not even blinking. And then—

His eyelids flicker, and he tilts his head slowly to the side. He blinks again. Almost like a sleepwalker, he moves to the center of the holographic city, where Metro Tower juts upwards beyond the rest of the buildings, its tall spire nearly level with Megamind's heart.

He gazes at it as if entranced, and slowly, he reaches out a hand, touches the tip of one finger to the tip of the spire.

"Zero," he says, standing perfectly still, eyes intent on the tower, "project me the in-progress schematic for the Heat Ray—placement on the top of Metro Tower."

The brainbot makes a soft whirring noise, and a third hologram, a machine sketched in glowing lines of orange and red, appears atop the tower.

"Quadruple the size."

The machine expands.

As it does so, other brainbots begin to silently swarm towards Megamind, circling slowly above him.

Megamind's lips start to curve. He reaches out his right hand without looking and a brainbot is there, holding out an uncapped permanent marker. Megamind takes it, and also the open notebook another brainbot silently hands him.

With feverish quickness, he begins to scrawl calculations across the page, eyes fixed on the holographic tower still. As soon as one page is finished, a brainbot snatches it away, flies off with it. Immediately, Megamind continues writing on the new page.

Again and again the process repeats—pages covered in swift markings, snatched away by brainbots. At some point, Megamind resumes pacing again as he works, the bots following behind him like a shoal of fish. After a while the brainbots, without any verbal direction or gestures from Megamind, begin to thread a webbing of string across the ceiling, weaving it like a spiderweb.

From the webbing, single lines are released, and to each of these lines, a page is attached.

Megamind tosses the marker aside, the ink run dry; even as he does so, he's reaching with his other hand for the replacement marker a brainbot is handing to him.

He resumes writing again, left-handed this time, adding sketches to the calculations. A diagram of a kind of curved lens, with the notation:

ferrofluid suspension

and

archimedes mirror

This sketch is taken up by a brainbot, but instead of simply hanging this one up, the brainbots copy it amongst themselves, reproducing it over and over again. Finally, the copying concluded, the brainbots hang the reproduced sketches.

These, though, hang lower, hovering just barely above the holographic city, carefully placed in a formation that blankets the whole thing.

Megamind tears the last page from the notebook himself and hands it to Zero, who takes it not to a string, but to the computer console. mechanical appendages click rapidly on the keyboard, and the hologram of the tower flickers, changes—a giant Tesla coil now stands on the uppermost platform of the tower, flanked on either side, and attached to, the pillars of a great archway. Thick wire coils around both columns of the archway, and the whole thing is attached with another coil of wire spiraling around the spire of Metro Tower itself.

Megamind drops the notebook and marker without looking—both are caught and carried away by brainbots. He takes a few steps backwards, still looking at the tower.

"Zero," he says, "input the calculations for the results of the Heat Ray's destruction by Metro Man's laser vision."

Zero's metal appendages fly over the keyboard, tapping rapidly. She pauses, her mechanical eyepiece swiveling up to look at Megamind.

"Run the simulation," he says.

She presses a single key.

The holographic projection of the Heat Ray blooms like a flame-colored flower, then flies apart in silent slow motion, pieces of it hanging suspended in the air like parts in an exploded diagram. From the explosion, a dull orange light washes out and upward. Most of it fades out at the edges, disappearing.

But some of it, instead, strikes the lowest pages of the idea cloud, the papers covered with the reproductions of the diagrams Megamind labeled archimedes mirror.

The light bounces off of the paper, like light off of a true mirror, reflecting back, downwards, towards the storm, the city. And—

The holographic projection of the storm is destroyed in a blaze of orange light.

Megamind laughs, one hand covering his mouth, the maniacal edge to it closer to semi-hysteria than wicked amusement.

"Brainbots," he says, voice uneven with laughter, "commence—commence preparations for—Project Heatwave."

"It's not going to last long, you know, Sir," Minion's voice from the edge of the hologram, and Megamind turns towards him, tottering slightly, clutching his blanket cape and grinning madly.

"Oh, but the effect will," Megamind says. "Even after Metro Man destroys the Heat Ray itself, the Archimedes Mirrors will keep reflecting enough heat to keep the storm from re-forming. Winter in Metrocity is about to be put on hold, Minion. Which I'm sure everyone will enjoy blaming me for—interference with the environment, natural order, seasonal change, evil evil etcy-tera. I'll make up a suitable monologue."

"And after Metro Man destroys the mirrors?" Minion hands Megamind a cup of steaming hot coffee.

Megamind takes it absently, still gesturing with his other hand.

"Oh, but he won't be able to find them! We're going to use the Invisible Shield tech on them. And they're not mechanical, they're electromagnitized ferrofluid, so he won't be able to hear them! Miss Ritchi will locate them eventually, I'm sure; she's clever like that, but it should take even her a little while."

He glances over at Minion, who is staring at him with an unimpressed expression.

"Oh, don't look at me like that, Minion! I'm fully capable of evil monologuing without completely giving my plan away; I'll be careful! And we'll program Spikeless to bite me if I start revealing too much. We'll have more than enough time!"

"More than enough time for what, Sir?" Minion asks, as if he's not sure he wants to know the answer.

Megamind's eyebrows draw together, his mouth going suddenly flat.

"For me to find whoever it is that thinks they can threaten my city," he says, voice soft, fury unfurling through the words slow and sensual as blood in water, "and show them how very mistaken they are."

His hands tighten on the mug he holds and he glances down at them, at the cup of coffee in them—and blinks owlishly, as if he has no idea how it got there.

Minion sighs.

"It's coffee, Sir," he says. "You drink it."

"Ah," Megamind says. "Right."

He lifts the mug to his lips and the camera angle spirals upwards as the brainbots take flight towards the shadowy parts of the Lair, darkness and jutting bits of metal and then just

darkness and

darkness

and

sunlight

shining through the broken panes of a dirty window, and the ghostly image of the brainbot hovering before it, looking at its own reflection. The image, too, even more insubstantial and unreal, of Megamind, standing above what appears to be a pile of dirty blankets, heaped in the corner of an abandoned building.

"—can't stay here; it's shed-u-aled for destruction," Megamind's voice is gentle, pitched low and soothing.

The brainbot turns, gliding over to hover beside Megamind, who is speaking not to the pile of blankets, but to the man huddled in the pile of blankets.

"Destruction by giant robot," Megamind adds. "We have plans to turn it into a shelter, eventually, but in the mean time, there are several current shelters that would be happy to take—"

The man clutches his blankets tighter, shakes his head rapidly. The tinfoil strips that criss-cross the top of the orange hard hat he's wearing glint silver in the dim sunlight.

He's a big man, bull-necked, hands sized like dinner plates, but he shrinks back from Megamind, mountainous shoulders hunched inwards, cringing and defiant at the same time.

"Nonono," he says. "Not going—not safe. You go to those places and then they get you; I'm not going; I'm not—"

"Get you," Megamind repeats, a line appearing between his eyebrows. "You mean—the shelters? It's not like—it's not like a prison, or like—like checking yourself in somewhere. They can't keep you there against your will; you can leave whenever you like."

A laugh jerks out of the man.

"Say that; don't say that. Say they can't keep you, but you can't trust them; can't—"

"Can't trust who?" Megamind asks.

"Government," the man says, practically spits the word, then looks around, eyes wild, thick fingers scrabbling at the blankets. "Won't go there again, won't go with you—"

"Do I look," Megamind asks, one side of his mouth lifted in a wry smile, "like someone who's particularly popular with the government?"

The man's roving eyes move back to Megamind's face. His lips work soundlessly for a long moment. Megamind's smile fades and his frown deepens again. Moving slow, unthreatening, he crouches down in front of the man, fingertips of one gloved hand resting lightly on the dust-thick floor.

"Again," he says. "What do you mean, 'won't go there again'?"

The man blinks, rapidly, mouth still working.

"—I could do things," he whispers finally. "Used to could do things. Small stuff. Like—"

A large hand skitters over the blankets, seizes hold of an empty aluminum can. He pulls it into his lap, lifts one shaky hand, holds it out, palm down, fingers spread. Slowly, with his other hand, he brings the can up, stops with it in the air, beside his empty, outstretched hand. For a long moment, he stares at the can, swaying lightly in place.

Suddenly he tightens the fingers of his empty hand into a fist. At the same moment, he crushes the can in his other hand.

He looks up at Megamind again, drops the can, and then his hands, into his lap.

"See?" he says.

"I think so," Megamind says slowly.

"Can't, anymore," the big man says simply. "The people in gray came and took me away, and now I can't do that anymore. They put a chip in my head, you know," he adds, tone casually conversational. "That's what this is for." He points at the strips of tinfoil on his hard hat. "Static to hide what I'm thinking, so they can't hear. People laugh, but I know what's true."

He nods again, blinking rapidly as his head bobs. And then he squints at Megamind—Megamind, who has gone very quiet and very still.

"You're not laughing," the man says slowly.

"—where did they put the chip?" Megamind asks, eyes intent on the man's face. "Did they put it behind your—"

"—left ear," the man says in unison with Megamind, as both of them reach up to press fingertips behind their own left ears.

"—buzzsaw sound," the man says, seemingly for no reason, but Megamind is nodding like this makes perfect sense. "ZzzzzZZZZZ. All the time. Makes it—"

"—so you can hardly think," Megamind murmurs.

"—so I can't do the thing anymore," the man says. "You—you know—"

"—what's true?" Megamind finishes for him softly. "Yes. I do." He holds out one hand, palm up. "Would you like me to take that chip out for you?"

The man stares at him, mouth working silently; chewing on unsaid words, trying to spit them out.

"It would be very safe," Megamind continues. "Minion is very medically skilled. We could use local anesthetic, so you wouldn't have to be asleep for it. And we could set up mirrors for you, so you could watch the whole thing." He pauses, watching the man's face. "How does that sound?" he asks gently. "Does that sound good?"

The man swallows, quick and convulsive, then nods, a rapid, repetitive series of motions. He reaches out, takes Megamind's hand—his is so large that it all but engulfs Megamind's, but the man clutches it like a lifeline as Megamind rises, pulls him gently to his feet.

"Good," Megamind says, looking up at the man—he towers over Megamind, but he's still gripping Megamind's hand like a frightened child. "Good," Megamind says again, "That's good. What's your—

(flash of light like sunlight glancing off of dirty glass, light mixed with

static and)

"—name, Zero," Megamind says, face coming into focus, framed against a brightdark smear of sunset sky. "You're allowed to change it."

The brainbot makes a low, grinding noise like a mechanical growl which slips fluidly into a higher register, ending on a soft, warbling sound. The view shifts as she moves her eyepiece down to look at the rooftop she and Megamind are both resting on. With one metal appendage, she draws a circle, scratching it into the concrete that lines the roof's edge.

Again, the view shifts as she looks up at Megamind. She reaches out and taps him with an appendage—taps the scratched circle—taps hers own braincase.

"Yes, I know I named you Zero," Megamind says. "But if you don't like it—"

Again the metallic grinding sound, followed by the three taps—Megamind, the circle, herself. Each is delivered with greater force—the one to Megamind, in particular, is more of a jab, than a tap. She follows this up with a repeated tap to the circle, to herself, for emphasis.

"All right; all right," Megamind says, holding up his hands. "I named you Zero; it's your name. But if you feel so strongly about it, then why are you so upset about it?" He reaches out a hand and strokes her braincase lightly, lovingly. "What is it, sweetheart? What's got you so worried, hmm?"

Zero makes a whirring noise and reaches out with an appendage to trace the circle once more, slower, wistful.

She follows the circle with two parallel, horizontal lines, and then stops, fans her mechanical limbs out in a gesture of someone spreading their hands. She tips her eyepiece up to look at Megamind again, then slowly moves it from side to side.

(nothing. negation.)

"Ohh," Megamind says. "Oh, Zero—my beautiful, perfect Zero—it's not like that at all. Here—look—"

He shifts position, bending one knee and reaching down to pull something from the top of his boot. A swift flick of his fingers and twist of his wrist and the butterfly knife unfolds, the fanning blade glinting redly in the dying light.

Holding the knife like a pen, Megamind traces over Zero's circle, then adds a long vertical line coming from the top of the circle. He crosses the top of this line with two short horizontal slashes.

Megamind leans close to Zero, one arm over her, so that she's pressed close to his hip. He taps the new symbol with the tip of the blade.

"This is the hieroglyph that the ancient Egyptians used to represent zero," he says, voice soft, a father telling a bedtime story to a child. "The throat—" he traces the vertical line downwards, "—and the heart," he traces the circle. "It's called nfr, and it's the same hieroglyph they used for 'beauty' and 'perfect'."

Zero reaches out and traces the symbol with tip of one metal appendage.

"When you're graphing something on a grid—" he quickly scratches a cross in the concrete, arrows at the ends of both lines, a circular mark where the two lines converge. "—or even in three-dimensional space—"

Next to the cross he scratches out a cube, three crossed lines inside the cube, six arrow-tipped rays pointing towards infinity in every direction, radiating out forever from the circular center point at their heart.

"—zero is always at the center," Megamind says. "The starting point, the place where everything converges. Zero is the boundary marker between positive and negative numbers—all numbers, positive or negative, are defined by their relationship to zero."

Zero tips her eyepiece upwards, looking at Megamind, who smiles down at her.

"Zero is the reason algebra is possible," he says, tone reverent. "It's what keeps two and twenty and two-hundred from looking the same—they used to, you know; and it was terribly confusing for everyone involved; you had to use context to guess which one people were writing about, and you can guess how well that went."

Zero makes a sharp noise and Megamind laughs.

"Yes," he says. "About that well."

He flicks the knife shut, replaces it in his boot. Zero shifts closer to him, leaning her eyepiece on his thigh.

"You can't ever divide zero," Megamind says. "You can't break it into fractions or decimals. Zero is always zero, always itself…"

Megamind's voice fades out as Zero blinks her eyepiece—slow—slower—and then—

The shutter opens again, slowly, sleepily.

It's dark now, and, the sky black and the lights of the city visible. Zero looks up at Megamind, who is gazing out at the city below them.

"Look at her, Zero," he says, voice hushed, eyes rapt. "Our Metrocity. Isn't she beautiful? Like a galaxy, stars made of electric light…"

Again the slow blink of the shutter, the fading of the image into darkness. Megamind's voice continues on a little longer, threading through the darkness.

"Streetlamp constellations to guide you home…"

#zero #brainbots #megamind #megamind/roxanne #code: safeword #fanfiction #this chapter sfw

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remys-lucky-franc · 4 years

Text

Return to Coney Island - An Astoria Fic - Cerberus x MC (Grace)

I got a request for some Cerberus x MC Date Fluff from the lovely @mcbatty :) Thank you so much for requesting and I really, really hope you enjoy this!

Cerberus is just the sweetest, most joyous boy and I just want wrap him up in a big hug!! (I've only read his first season!) I am a huuuuuge sucker for soft boys with sad stories.

I've written this with my MC's name (Grace) but if you'd prefer to read it with a different name, let me know and I'd be more than happy to edit it in for you.

Word count ~1800 // Image Credit: http://nyc2way.blogspot.com/

No triggers or warnings on this wee fic, it's just fluffy and feel-good! <3

---

"Grace, do you need help? What are you doing?"

Cerberus pokes his head around the door-frame, muscled arms folded across his broad chest as he shakes his head smiling at his girl; she's packing food into a tote bag on the counter.

"You know they have places we can eat on Coney Island, right?"

Grace zips the bag up and stretches up on her toes to place a kiss on his cheek as she scoots past him towards the bedroom, calling behind her,

"I know, but I thought it would be nice to take some snacks for a beach picnic, then we can get something else later? Plus, I'm sure you'll manage!"

Cerberus chuckles as Grace reappears in a cute cap and a pair of shades,

"I won't let the picnic go to waste, I promise. Ready?"

Grace hands him their bag of munchies and links her arm through his as they head out of the door and towards the station.

---

Cerberus is bouncing on his toes as the Q train arrives, energy radiating from him,

"This was a great idea, Grace! Really cool way to spend our day off!"

Finding a seat on the busy carriage, their knees bump as the train starts to move. Cerberus intertwines his fingers with Grace's as she murmurs,

"I thought it would be nice to go back and just have a good time? When we went before we were on the look out for... You know..."

Cerberus looks stoic for a few moments, finally commenting,

"We weren't even 'together' yet, last time when we came here."

Grace nods happily as she squeezes his hand,

"But we are now."

The train speeds through Brooklyn towards their destination as Cerberus helps himself to the club sandwiches that Grace packed, laughing as she rolls her eyes, telling him that they were supposed to be for the beach.

Time flies as they chat about work, ideas for vacation and future dates. Before they know it, an hour has passed and they're ready to disembark at Stillwell Avenue. Heading out of the station, Cerberus wraps an arm around Grace's waist, planting a soft kiss on the top of her denim hat as he squeezes her close for a few steps, his arms remaining draped around her as they walk. Grace feels a blush colouring her cheeks at the casual intimacy of his touch: she loves the way he wants to be close to her always, how affectionate he is.

Reaching the beach at the east side of Luna Park, Cerberus lays down a round beach blanket printed to look like a pepperoni pizza, placing their picnic bag down at the end before plopping himself in the middle. Beaming up at Grace as she pulls a bottle of sunscreen out of her purse, waggling it in his direction, he stretches, pulling the dark grey t-shirt over his head, laughing and taking the bottle from his girl. Grace stealthily admires his frame from behind the camouflage of her sunglasses, taking the bottle back, applying some to her arms and sprawling down on the giant pizza beside him. Grace delves into the bag, tossing a bag of potato chips to Cerberus who catches them effortlessly. Grace sets up a little speaker on the blanket and connects the 'Day at the Beach' playlist she created especially for today while Cerberus happily tosses chips into his mouth, tapping his foot to the beat, watching the world go by. They lie there people-watching, watching the shapes of the clouds in the sky change, soaking in the atmosphere and the sunshine for a while before Grace spots a vendor selling watermelon. She grabs her purse, ruffling Cerberus' shaggy brown hair then jumping to her feet,

"Wait here! I'll be right back!"

Cerberus shakes his head and fixes the hair that Grace mussed up as he watches her jog effortlessly across the sand, his heart swelling as he watches her. As she disappears from his line of sight, he takes out his phone and checks the group chat he has with his brothers, waiting for her to return. Before he's realised, she's back, carrying two watermelons with neon straws in them! A peal of laughter rings out of Cerberus as he looks at the giddy grin on her face,

"What did you get?!"

Grace giggles as she hands him one, sitting down cross-legged opposite him,

"Try it!!"

Cerberus cocks his head to the side, watching her bright eyes dance with mischief, before taking a big slurp through the straw, blinking hard as he swallows and lets out a small cough,

"That's... Pretty strong stuff, Grace..."

She beams at him as she takes a dainty sip,

"They scoop out all the watermelon, then blend it with ice and vodka and put it back inside!"

He takes another sip, acknowledging,

"It pack a punch but it's really tasty! Hey, come here, let's send Orthrus and Nemean a selfie?"

Grace shifts herself so that her back is against Cerberus' chest as he stretches his arm out, making sure both of them, and their tropical-looking vodka watermelons are in the shot,

"Say, 'Watermelon!'..."

Cerberus laughs heartily as he presses his cheek against hers, snapping the shot as they mouth in unison,

"Watermelon!"

He grins, wide and white, as he sends it, then sets it as his lock screen wallpaper.

---

After having enough sunbathing, Cerberus and Grace gather their belongings, strolling hand in hand along the bustling boardwalk, feeling slightly tipsy from the spiked slushie. Cerberus pulls Grace towards the carnival games, a flash of excitement in his eyes, spotting the Strongman Game, and the variety of stuffed animals hanging up for the winner... Grace wraps her arms around him from behind as he stops in front of the game, grinning at the attendant. He pays the fee and accepts the mallet, staring at the bell, twenty feet in the air. Graces stands back as he effortlessly swings the mallet in a perfect arc, clean and high, landing squarely on the lever. The puck flies up the tower striking the bell hard! Cerberus drops the mallet with a ‘woop’, gathering Grace in his arms and spinning her around and around in the air as she squeals and giggles. He kisses her as he places her back on the ground, gesturing toward the prizes,

"Which is your favourite, Grace?"

She shrugs her shoulders, scrunching her nose as she answers, sounding almost shy,

"You're my favourite. You choose?"

Cerberus' mouth opens like he's about to say something, but he just winks at her instead, turning towards the attendant, reappearing moments later with the biggest, fluffiest, plush bear Grace has ever seen! The bear is so large, that he's almost obscured behind it, his head poking around from behind it, cracking up with laughter,

"Did I pick well?? Do you like him??"

Grace wraps her arms around the bear and her boyfriend, laughing so hard there are tears in her eyes,

"Like him?! I love him!! And I love you!!"

Cerberus beams as he tries to manoeuver the bear out of the way, with somewhat limited success, to kiss Grace,

"What shall we call him??"

Grace, running her fingers through the bears soft fur, winks at Cerberus as she speaks,

"He's big and soft and snuggly, just like you. How about Bear-berus?"

Cerberus disintegrates into hysterics,

"Bear-berus it is!"

---

After playing various other funfair games, Grace smirks at a blushing Cerberus when his stomach growls loudly,

"You wanna get some food?"

He nods quickly as Grace catches his fingers in hers, dancing across the boardwalk towards Nathan's. The diner is jam-packed and loud with a jukebox playing and patrons laughing and joking, enjoying their day at the beach. Cerberus, Bear-berus and Grace squeeze into a booth together, ordering a couple of their famous Chilli Dogs with fries and a large chocolate milkshake to share. She smiles softly as she watches Cerberus tuck into the food: she loves being with him. Everything about his is so genuine, so honest. He makes her feel like she can do anything when they're together. She feels so lucky to have him.

Grace has barely touched hers by the time his is gone, and he's ordering a second portion of fries. His face colours as she tries to hold back a chuckle,

"I knew a portion to share wouldn't be enough!"

Cerberus drains at least a quarter of the milkshake before grinning at her up at her,

"I think Bear-berus ate most of them when we weren't looking... You know, we should come back here next time Orthrus, Nemean and I all have the day off: they'd love this."

Grace laughs,

"We may have to call in advance to make sure they have enough food!"

---

Leaving Nathan's, the couple call into the hall of mirrors on their way to the Ferris wheel, giggling and pulling faces at each other in the distorted glass. Tears roll down Grace's cheeks as they stop in front of one particular mirror that makes her look tall and broad and Cerberus short and skinny, crushed under the weight of the giant fluffy bear; she pulls out her cellphone, snapping a photo of their hilarious reflection and sending it to May.

Finally arriving at the Ferris wheel, they join the slowly moving queue. Cerberus toys with Grace's ponytail,

"Last time when we got to the top we never got to enjoy the view, we were so busy looking for Thanatos."

She nods,

"You're right. But this time, we can really enjoy it properly!"

Bending down, Cerberus kisses Grace gently,

"I enjoy everything when we're together, Grace. Even the stuff that shouldn't be fun, like queueing."

Grace pulls his lips back to hers,

"Same."

When they reach the front of the queue, Cerberus jokes with the attendant that he needs three tickets: one for him, one for Grace and one for the bear. The attendant smiles, telling him that anyone that cute gets on for free. He beams joyously as he quips,

"Hey Grace, you're so cute you get to ride for free, we only need to pay for me and Bear-berus!"

Tugging Grace's hand they find their seat and are secured in place by the attendant before they soar into the sky. Cerberus swings his dangling legs as they near the top, breathing in the fresh air as he turns to Grace,

"This has been a perfect day!"

Grace's head lolls against his shoulder as she sighs contentedly,

"Mmmh-hmmm..."

Cerberus' bright eyes smile as he tips her chin up to look at him, his thumb rubbing over her knuckles,

"You're the best thing that ever happened to me."

Grace reaches up stroking his cheek tenderly , her eyes flitting between his amber eyes and the warm curve of his lips,

"I love you."

Cerberus closes the distance between them, whispering against Grace's lips,

"I love you too."

They settle there, happy and comfortable with each other, enjoying the view as they sail through the sky together: a perfect end to a perfect date.

#lovestruck fic #lovestruck requests #Cerberus x mc #Astoria fic #Cerberus x mc fic

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theawkwardterrier · 5 years

Text

These Bricks and Beams

Steggy Week 2k19, day 5 Prompt: Domestic Bliss

Summary: On the house hunt. Frustratingly.

AO3 link here.

Peggy has a plan. She does for most things, after all, and buying her first house as a newlywed is no exception. She and Steve have stayed in the familiar flat they love several months past its being strictly comfortable. It’s always been a small place, and it was already becoming cramped with two of them living there. Steve’s clothes hang in the front closet because the bedroom wardrobe is too small for them to share, and now they’re stepping around wedding gifts when they just want to make some toast in the morning.

So one Monday Peggy puts the plan into motion, calling up a Realtor and requesting that they be shown some scaled up residential properties on the market. She and Steve have agreed on their basic qualifications for size, location, price range, and amenities, and Hank Farmer (Number 1 seller three years running! - according to whom, she wonders) gives her every indication that he’ll be able to find some good options for them to see by next week.

Farmer is just as toothily smiling in person as he sounds over the phone. She and Steve exchange a look, but he does come highly recommended (Steve had actually called the local Realtors Bureau, and apparently it is they who keep statistics on who has sold the most in the area) so they push onward, schooling their faces into welcoming blankness.

They see four properties on the first day, flats larger than their current one but with prices that push at the upper boundary of their budget and perhaps even overflow. Steve widens his eyes and shakes his head behind Hank's back when he tells them how much the third floor walkup costs, and she isn't entirely certain the serum will protect her husband from giving himself a stroke at the thought of writing the monthly rent check.

Hank shows them some houses at their next outing, which do have the advantage of price and space, although she'll have a slightly longer commute.

"These units are just sprouting up like weeds," Hank enthuses as they walk through their third such identical house. "Got plenty of young couples set up in ones just like this, and they love them! All the latest: garage for the tinkering gentleman, fresh new linoleum and appliances for the missus." No matter how many times they've mentioned that Steve plans to stay home, Hank refuses to actually absorb the information, handling his discomfort over the arrangement by ignoring it completely and carrying on as if they haven't said anything at all.

His information is accurate, at least. "I think the first kitchen is a bit bigger, and the fourth had lovely exposure if you'd actually like to start that garden, but they all seem in order and they tick the boxes that we'd discussed," Peggy says on the way home.

Steve makes a little sound of acknowledgement, although it's so absent that it almost sounds like one of his sleeping noises. He doesn't speak for a while, and when he says, "I'm not sure that I could see us in any of them. Maybe we should keep looking," he sounds oddly tentative.

She looks over at him in the dim light. She doesn’t know what the purpose would be exactly, but she loves her husband and he has good judgment in his own way. "Certainly we can," she agrees readily.

A month later she is regretting her easy acquiescence. They have gone out with Hank Farmer twice more and seen a dozen other options in the growing suburban communities surrounding the city, and Steve has nodded through each tour, shaken Hank's hand politely, and on the way home said that he couldn't picture them in any of them. Finally Hank told them that perhaps they needed a break to recalculate what they were looking for, and even he looked exhausted, his smile just about ready to melt off his face.

Peggy tells herself that it's fine. She has a backup plan, too, and each morning she and Steve sit in their kitchen which seems increasingly tiny and circle likely listings in the paper. Once a week, they go see them in person. The novelty of shopping for such a major purchase, of getting to see inside all different homes, has long worn off for Peggy. On the way up each front walk, she thrusts her purse over her shoulder with a grimness once reserved for warfare.

And yet Steve continues to reject each house with equally flimsy logic each time: the front door of this one opened right into the kitchen, their current furniture wouldn't coordinate well with the wallpaper in that one. Once or twice, Peggy wonders dully whether he is tormenting her on purpose for some reason, but of course that’s not his nature and, anyway, he is too open for such deception. His face would show any such ridiculous thing in an instant.

Finally one Saturday morning he brings the newspaper over and starts to open it to the classified section and she snaps.

"I don't expect to find anything promising in there," she tells him tartly, buttering her toast so violently she wonders if the bread will be entirely crumbs before she is done. "We've likely seen all that's on offer at least once before, and if we haven't, you'll no doubt discount any new options with ever more minor explanations. Tell me, is there a particular reason that we haven't seen a single property where you can apparently imagine us living?"

"I know," he says, his voice softly miserable. He folds the paper and sets it on the table with that care that she admires and loves so much. She softens a bit despite herself.

"Can you at least try to explain it to me?" she asks, but he shakes his head.

"I can't even explain it to myself. All those places we've seen, they look fine. They all look nearly the same, as a matter of fact - I’m sure I'm just torturing you, making you go tour each one when if you've seen one you've seen them all. But I don't know, Peg. They just don't feel like our house." He steps away from her, sliding his hands into his pockets. "I'm going to take a walk, okay?"

He is gone for so long that she is called into the office before seeing him again. She's distracted all day, her thoughts returning to him at each open moment, always an undercurrent of wondering and worrying even as she takes care of the problems that she can.

He's made shepherd's pie, she realizes as she returns home that evening, and she softens toward him even more. She'd only mentioned once that she used to beg her mother for it at every occasion and she still considers it such a comforting dish.

He kisses her gently as she comes into the kitchen and dishes her out a portion. She starts in on it immediately - apparently worrying over one's husband builds an appetite - and it is a minute before she realizes that his still remains untouched.

Swallowing, she asks, "Did your walk help?"

"It did." He looks down at the table and then back up at her again. "I hate all the places that we've seen. They're just copies of each other, and more than that, we don’t know whether they’ll last."

"They've all been inspected," Peggy feels obligated to point out, poking a fork tine through a single pea rolling on the edge of her plate.

"I don't mean that they're going to fall to pieces tomorrow. But they haven’t been tested at all. In twenty years, in fifty, are they going to just be identical pasteboard wrecks? The place we buy is going to be where we live our lives. We're going to bring kids there, and maybe grandkids." He presses his hands together. "I want our home to be something more, Peg."

She doesn't entirely understand - all of the houses had looked fine to her, decently built if modern, not exactly what she was accustomed to from England, and an older house certainly had its own likelihood of falling to pieces or becoming a nuisance to keep patched together - but she touches his hand, closing her fingers around his and squeezing.

"We can keep looking," she says, and she finds in his smile the strength she needs to make it true.

It's not a newspaper advertisement that finally leads them to the place, but Rita Langforth from down the street who mentions that her great-uncle and -aunt are selling their house to move where it's warmer. Peggy and Steve go to look the next afternoon.

"It’s a bit small, but we never really considered leaving. We moved in here the day after we were married, all the way back in ‘06," Anna Moss tells them as she takes them through each room, a fond sadness on her face as she looks about at everything. "Joe carried me over that threshold, and carried each of our babies out for baptism after they were born upstairs."

"She weighed about the same as the babies, though she was about a thousand times prettier," Joe Moss jokes in his craggy tenor and Anna blushes and says, "Don't lie to the children, Joey."

"Are you truly certain you can part with a place like this, with so many memories?" Peggy asks gently. Anna keeps touching the solid wood doorframes, and Joe has pointed out a half dozen spots with particular imperfections or stories in a way that Peggy understands to mean that he has several hundred more to share.

"Oh, it's getting to be a little too much for us," Joe says with peaceful regret.

"We'd like to pass it on to someone who will love it as much as we have," Anna adds earnestly. She peers at Peggy through her small eyeglasses. "I would be happy to give it to the two of you."

"Steve?" Peggy looks over to where he is standing in a shaft of sunlight, taking in the place with a slightly distant look in his eyes. Until he looks at her, and he focuses, and smiles.

"I can picture us here," he says. “Can’t you?”

And although she'll never admit it, she's happy he made them keep looking, because she can picture them here in a way she couldn't entirely in the other places they had seen. There it had been the vague shadow of a Steve chopping vegetables at the counter, or a version of herself taking advantage of the fireplace: images which were almost functional, as if she were posing paper dolls or extending a measuring tape to make sure that the two of them were the right size for the interior. But here it is a whole life she can see, a vivid array of board games and reading together in this parlor, a Christmas tree which will stand in that corner, of dancing in full view of the windows for no reason at all, waving to neighbors from the front porch, of children who will bicker over who has the bedroom with the window seat and challenge each other to climb the shade tree in the front yard.

Peggy turns to the Mosses and asks, "Where can we sign?"

Three weeks later they stand in the middle of their new front hallway. Their old loveseat is already in place, as are the kitchen table and chairs, and the new bed they bought. Otherwise they are accompanied only by three suitcases and five boxes. Neither of them has been particularly accustomed to permanency or the acquisition that comes with it.

“How in the world are we to fill this place?” Peggy asks, turning this way and that with hands on her hips.

Steve rests his hands on top of hers. He kisses her until she twines her fingers with his, then pulls back and looks at her so he can say, “We already have.”

#steggyweek2k19 #Steggy #Steggy fic #Steve Rogers #Peggy Carter

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simplyshelbs16xoxo · 4 years

Text

‘Repeating History’ Chapter 6: I’ll Find a Way to You

FFN | Ao3 | Buy Me a Coffee?

2016

Molly rushed up the stairs to 221B, throwing the door open with such force, it caused Sherlock to jump.

“What is it?” she asked, hesitance in every step she took towards him. He was looking down at something—a photograph, perhaps—and his face showed no emotion other than shock.

“It’s…” he began, “us.” Sherlock felt, rather than saw, Molly hovering beside him.

“Sherlock…” what she saw was their faces staring back at them, the wallpaper backdrop not dissimilar to the flat they now stood in. “That’s us…that’s how I see you in those dreams…is that how you see me?”

“Yes,” he admitted. “My mother sent this to me; she thought we would be interested.”

“Ha!” Molly laughed in disbelief. “Well, this confirms it.”

“We had past lives…as…ourselves?” Sherlock asked. “Strange how past lives are depicted as the same soul in a different body.”

“Maybe it’s one of those star-crossed things,” Molly suggested. Sherlock only frowned in confusion. “Perhaps we wanted to be together in a different life, and for whatever reason, it didn’t work out.” Still nothing. “It sounds crazy, I know, but it’s the only thing that makes sense.”

“Preposterous,” Sherlock muttered. “How can this be?” Everything he had known to be true had turned on its head. He focused in on Molly’s face. “Why do you look so upset?”

Molly took a closer look. Most Victorian photographs upheld a serious, unpleasant feel, but Sherlock was right; she looked distraught. “You don’t look very happy either,” she pointed out. He appeared to be uncomfortable. “Something unsettling must have occurred just before the photograph was taken,” she reasoned.

“Sherlock!” Lestrade rushed into the flat. “We found another victim, and it’s much more gruesome than before.”

“Do you need me too?” Molly asked.

“We’ll be alright, Molls,” Greg assured her. “Anderson is on the scene.”

Sherlock groaned at this. Turning to Molly, he said, “I’ll be back as soon as possible.”

“Promise?” Molly asked, a small smile forming on her lips.

“I promise,” he assured her. “I love you.”

Molly opened her mouth to speak the words he so wanted to hear, but nothing came out but a strangled gasp. She closed her eyes in defeat. “I’m sorry.”

Sherlock molded his hand around her shoulder. “It’s alright. I understand.” A tear fell from Molly’s eye and hit the back of his hand. “I know you love me.”

Smiling at his acknowledgement, she wiped another tear from her eye. “Solve me a murder, Sherlock.”

There was a strong stench of copper and decay in the alley where the victim was found. Sherlock Holmes held a handkerchief dabbed in vapor rub to his nose to avoid the putrid scent. The victim was definitely a woman, possibly in her early thirties. She was hardly recognizable what with her organs spilling out every which way. Upon closer inspection, there appeared to be scratches all over her exposed bosoms. The only organ that was missing was—

“Where’s her stomach?” Sherlock asked.

“Over here!” Anderson shouted by the dumpsters.

“Her stomach?” Sherlock asked once more.

“No,” Anderson replied, “I found another victim.”

“Jesus,” Lestrade remarked. “Let’s get her out of there!”

The woman had been retrieved from the dumpster carefully as to not disturb whatever clues they could get from her. Sherlock was glad for once that Molly was not here. She was tough, but the grisly scene was nearly too much for even him to handle.

“Seems like the intestines are missing,” Anderson informed them. “Everything else is accounted for.”

Sherlock studied the corpse further. “There,” he pointed below her abdomen. “Her bladder is gone as well.” Their modern day Ripper was collecting organs, but for what purpose? Were organs his consolation prize after committing such a crime? “That leaves the brain and heart.”

“Don’t forget the skin,” Anderson reminded him. “It’s not commonly known that it’s—“

“The largest organ of the body, yes, I know,” Sherlock finished in agitation. Volatile images of a poor unsuspecting woman being skinned alive plagued his mind, making him shudder. The consulting detective was never squeamish, but this case had him feeling uneasy. Perhaps Molly was right; he jumped right into things too quickly after Sherrinford. It was too late, though. Sherlock would never forgive himself if he quit the case now, especially when all of these women had been put through so much pain.

“Calm down, it’ll be alright,” Greg spoke into his phone. “You know he will. We’ll find her.”

An uneasiness coursed through Sherlock’s body. There was a lump in his throat, and he felt as though he was going to be sick. Flashes of a torture scene flickered in his mind. There was a young woman, but he couldn’t make out her features. The street was spinning—no, he was falling—down, down, down.

“Sherlock!” Lestrade shouted, running over to him. It was the last thing the detective heard before everything went black.

1894

Restlessness plagued Molly Hooper for the rest of the night. Her mind was racing after her tiff with Sherlock. What distressed her most was that she was no closer to finding Meena’s murderer. Her father was asleep on the settee in the sitting room, snoring peacefully. She thought of the new friend she had in Mrs. Watson. Molly had only seen her at the hospital a handful of time, and attended to her twice since Doctor Mudgett’s disappearance.

It was at that moment that everything clicked into place. Mudgett disappeared shortly before the murders began…could it be? No. Molly shook the thought from her head. It had to be a coincidence. Sherlock’s hand-me-down words from the eldest Holmes brother entered her mind.

What do we say about coincidence? The universe is rarely so lazy.

“Oh, God,” Molly muttered, wasting no time. “I’ll be back, father. I need to see a man about a murder.”

Fastening her cloak around her shoulders, and drawing up her hood, Molly set off for Baker Street. The hansoms had no business running this late, so she knew she’d have to make the trip on foot. With every step, her anxiety grew. Baker Street was only a few streets away; it would take her no longer than twenty minutes. With that knowledge, she picked up her speed, moving at a near-run. No matter what she heard, saw, or felt, Molly Hooper did not stop for any of it. The best thing was for her to keep moving steadily, onward to 221B.

Though it was probably paranoia, Molly felt a pair of eyes watching her the entire time. She nearly squealed with delight was the door to Sherlock’s flat came into view. She shouted his name as loudly as she could muster. Just as her hand reached for the knocker, a cold, clammy hand pulled her back. A bloodcurdling scream ripped from her lips, alerting nearly every tenant on the street. A cloth was being held against her mouth now, making her sink into the inky blackness of unconsciousness

Sherlock Holmes was pacing, his mind moving at speeds he could not fathom. Why did he have to allow his damn pride to get in the way of everything? Why could he not allow himself to give in to the love of the most captivating woman he had ever encountered? Margaret Hooper had put him in his place, and rightly so. He needed to apologise. There was no way around it.

“Sherlock!”

He knew that voice. It was Molly. She came back.

Sherlock’s heart nearly leapt out of his chest. He ran to the window, and threw it open in an effort to speak with her, but as he did so, a bloodcurdling scream reverberated throughout the entire street.

“Molly?” He searched the street from above, but there was no sign of her.

“Molly, where are you?” he shouted. When no answer came, he rushed down the stairs and out the door, his bare feet hitting the freezing the ground.

“Molly!? Oh God,” he cried, his breathing heavy. “No. No, no, no!”

“Snap out of it!” Mycroft shouted in his mind palace. “Concentrate. Which direction did she come from? In which direction did she possibly go?”

Sherlock scanned his surroundings. She came from the left side of the street if she came from her home. Whoever took her was obviously going in the same direction, but did not take the risk of dragging her down the street. He could have disappeared down an alley for a quick getaway. This madman had Molly, and Sherlock Holmes was going to do everything in his power to save her.

“Lestrade.” Yes, he needed to go to Scotland Yard immediately. A search needed to be organised and soon.

2016

I’ll burn the heart out of you.

Jim Moriarty’s words circled his mind as he came to. The first thing he saw was a bright light, the faces in the room fuzzy. As his sight began to clear, he noticed Greg’s sullen expression. A chilling scream only he could hear came to the detective’s mind. It belonged to Molly. He knew it did.

“Molly,” Sherlock croaked. “She’s gone, isn’t she?”

“Kidnapped,” Greg confirmed. “She isn’t dead—not yet. A note was found taped to your door, though.”

Sherlock snatched it, sitting right up in the hospital bed. “Margaret Hooper had morbid humour; too bad she never wed. She fell apart with a broken heart, and all they found was her head.” He felt nauseous, his stomach doing somersaults. “Oh God,” he cried. “We have to find her! Right now!” He thrashed about in the bed, pulling out the IV in his arm.

Nobody argued with him or advised him to stay in bed. They knew what Molly meant to Sherlock. He wouldn’t allow anything or anybody to get in his way. “Ughhhh,” he doubled over in pain, the room spinning. Instead of fighting it, he allowed the visions to come.

The land was familiar, sprawling every which way. In the distance, he could see a manor. There was no denying it. He was at Musgrave Hall, only the outlines of the funny gravestones were visible from where he stood. Moriarty’s voice began singing in his ear, “Sherlock Holmes upon his throne like to slay the dragons. He loved to roam amongst funny gravestones, before he fell off the wagon.”

Gasping for air, Sherlock came to once more. “I know where she’s been taken.” He turned to Lestrade. “Organise a search party. We’re going to Musgrave Hall.”

John Watson woke to a rapping on the door. “Bloody hell,” he groaned. “What now?”

“What is it?” Mary asked tiredly.

“John, please, open up!” Sherlock’s voice called out.

The Watsons were up and out of bed faster than light. John answered the door, noting the anguish on Sherlock’s face.

“Molly’s been taken,” he panted.

“Where?” Mary asked, fear gripping her heart.

“Musgrave Hall,” Sherlock replied heavily. “John, I would normally recruit you for this, but I need Mary’s skillset. It’s too important.”

John nodded. “Of course, yeah. I’ll stay with Rosie.”

Mary was off to get dressed, and returned no more than five minutes later. “Let’s go.”

1894

Funny Gravestones. Sherlock was trying to recall the significance of it. He searched his mind palace, diving into the depths of it, until finally, it occurred to him where Molly could have been taken.

“Musgrave Hall,” Sherlock told Lestrade. “Miss Hooper was taken to Musgrave Hall; it was my former childhood home.”

“Why would he take her there?” Lestrade inquired. “She has no connection to the place…does she?”

Flashes of his now-deceased sister came to mind. There was another girl present too with chestnut locks, her nose upturned just like—

“I,” Sherlock began, “I think I grew up with her…how on earth did I forget?”

They took a hansom cab to the nearest train station, and whilst on board, Sherlock delved deeper into his repressed memories. He remembered Eurus being jealous that he would choose to play with Molly rather than her. Then, there was the day that Eurus had trapped Molly in the well that sat within the woods surrounding his family home. After saving her, Sherlock never saw her again until this year. He hadn’t even remembered her; his best friend from childhood. Then again, he realised, she hadn’t recognised him either.

Lestrade studied the detective before him, noting that he was in deep thought. A sorrowful look came upon his face. “What’s wrong?”

Snapping out of it, Sherlock had the detective inspector repeat the question. “What’s wrong is that I completely pushed away any memories of Molly from when we were children. I have been a right foul git to her. Aside from that, she may or may not be trapped in a well. We have to save her.”

“We will, Sherlock.” Lestrade didn’t show it, but he was afraid they were already too late.

“Somebody help!” Molly shouted into the endless darkness. She hadn’t a clue where she was, but it was dark, cold, and damp. One thing she knew was that she wasn’t outside. Otherwise, she would be pelted with raindrops right now.

A cold, sinister laugh echoed through the room. A man in a bowler hat peered out from the shadows, and into what little light there was. “There is nobody to help you, my dear.”

“Who are you!?” she demanded. “If I am going to die, then you might as well tell me!”

The man stepped closer towards her until they were face to face, his mustache nearly brushing her nose. “The name is Doctor Henry Mudgett,” he replied. “Nice to see you again, Doctor Hooper.”

“You,” Molly gasped. “You were Mary’s doctor; the one that disappeared into thin air.”

He chuckled in amusement. “Yes, but I am known under a different moniker now, Doctor Hooper. I use my mother’s maiden name. I believe that my cousin harbours deep feelings for you.”

Molly looked at him with questioning eyes.

“H.H. Holmes is the name now. I believe you’ve met my cousin, Sherlock?”

#sherlolly #sherlolly halloween at 221b #sherlolly halloween 2019 #repeating history #my fanfiction

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real-fanta-sea · 5 years

Text

Red thread trash - AU Trikey fanfic

Hey! I promised to upload my fanfic here as well - find it right below the “Keep reading” button. Let me know what you think about it - your feedback fuels me like anything else :) I included some minor hints of pop culture/literature every now and then and generally had a great time writing it even though it’s still short. I plan on updating it soon so if you like it, stay tuned :) Chapter 1 - My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains my sense “You are sick, dickhead!” That was all she was able to spit out before shutting the door with such force all the yellowish photos on walls thumped the disgusting, bleached out wallpaper they were attached to. It was getting dark and a sharp sound sent shockwaves through creeping silence of the night. Tired street lamps gave out eerie orange light which sculpted everything in soft outlines and gave a fine monochrome touch to washed-out colours of the early evening. Dust, startled by the outburst, sat back on surfaces it originally sat on, creating a delicate icing on the ugly cake of an apartment it was in. It was full to the brim, filled with dying cacti in flower pots, virgin self-improvement books, some of them sealed in original plastic, action figures, statues, souvenirs from places so distant and abstract no one ever heard of them, old calendars and along with dozens of empty ball pens an assorted clutter of a bachelor. It was a miracle the small, one-room apartment did not explode with everything stored inside. On the wall next to the door, the landline phone decided to commit what it’s silent owner contemplated for years and fell down from the holder, and hit the ground with an ugly crunch. The sound made the owner snap from lethargy. Up to now, he only stood in the middle of the place, staring at the door emotionless.

He felt nothing but a gentle touch of the street light and bags under his eyes growing heavier. When he heard what happened to his world link, he blinked and with a sigh, he took a step forward and hanged the phone back to the holder, inspecting it only to find nothing broke so far. “There, there, not today- You’ll outlive me, little friend” he let out a raspy mumble and rub back of his neck with his other hand. He didn’t feel anything out of ordinary. His back hurt a bit from the lair of his improvised bed and his sedentary job - the latter was most likely the culprit there, but he wouldn’t admit it. His stomach rumbled angrily through the thin skin and onto the fabric of his shirt - two cups of ramen a day were not enough to shut it anymore. His nose was full again - and the dust irritated it as much as it annoyed him. Yet somewhere deep inside him, the void seized power a long time ago and he didn’t give a shit about any of these things anymore. For the life of his, he couldn’t bring himself to grieve the recent loss of a lover either. People always came and went, he thought to himself. People always used him. Cheated him. Played him and inevitably left him when he needed them the most. They left him miserable. Vulnerable. Hurt. He didn’t need nor want them anymore. He abided them. He just wanted them all to die a horrible, gruesome death and if possible, to watch the whole process from the first row, bathe in their cries and pleading and enjoy his utter shortage of fucks to give with a wide grin on his face. Aaand it would make the show so much fun if he got to sprinkle his popcorn with a bit of fresh blood! Hell, if he murdered his shrink first, he would help more people than that stupid jerk ever did in his life. Come to think of it... Suddenly, before he could slide any further on his twisted spiral of thoughts, there was a familiar pressure on one of his feet and a soft purr vibrating against his shin. He blinked the mental image of creatively mutilated psychologist away and eyed his pet with a soft smile. The tomcat which settled on his foot was one of the new members of the pack as he prefered to call his furry companions. It gave those obese fluffy balls of fur a feral glamour of feared predators they might have shared with their ancestors. In reality, his pack preferred the luxury of being fed three times a day and shedding hair on his sweatshirts while sleeping wherever they collapsed. The tiny apartment currently held six members including the human one. They were all flawed to perfection, collected from behind the bars and given a new life. John Silver, the tomcat, curled up securely on his master's barefoot, lack one paw to be a complete, light grey cat. He probably lost it in a scientific experiment which went tremendously wrong and accidentally involved an electric can opener and children of his previous master. He never meowed about it but other cats knew anyway. Then there was Jude Hardy, a brown cat who smelled so bad other hissed anytime at her anytime she came close and made her spend life under the kitchen sink. Johny Lemmon had shotgun scars visible through his tabby and white fur - he got them for meowing too loud. Somewhere under the blanket on a bed was a tabby named Ulysses who lost his tail and ear on his way home one day in an accident. Right beside him slept his sister Sybile who was terribly short-sighted and bumped to anything when she attempted walking around the flat. She was there when her brother was hit by the car but there was nothing she could do to prevent it as she didn't see it coming. The only human left in the pack was named Trevor Philips.

With a cat in his arms, he made his way through a maze of full bookshelves and sat heavily into an old armchair, fidgeting to find the perfect angle. Nothing could ever compare to a fuzzy feeling of love he shared with his pack. A soft touch of fur soothed him in a way his prescription pills would never do. Trevor raised his eyes from a purring bundle of joy he held and run his fingertips down its spine, scratching and gently stroking every now and then, completely lost in his own palace of thoughts again. There’s still a couple of hours left till next dose, he thought to himself. He vividly remembered the first week he was forced to medication - a wild roar of anger and disgust from being put on a schedule, from becoming a number not worth anything else but chemical alternation. He hated every touch of an old, naphthalene smelling nurse or the bull kind of a doctor who forced his jaw open to the point it snapped on one wonderful evening. He always had himself for a person not bound by any chains or rules. His persistence in breaking rules and spitting medicine was legendary. Heck, he did it for fun. It gave him all the attention he never had and fuck people who had to pay for it with their health of job. However, one day, he woke up a different person. The mighty, untamed creature he once was was gone, and the only memory it left were nail scratches on sterile white walls of his cell and a variety of body fluids mixed and smeared all over the ceiling in a brutal, honest impersonation of Michelangelo’s chapel. The day the beast went missing was a breaking point. The world he woke up to was void of bright colours. Every bit and piece of his existence felt detached, taken aback, abstract. He would always recall the feeling of cold liquid under his bare feet and a horrid smell that brought him to senses. He never asked the doctor how long he had stood in his own faeces nor did he ask why he pissed blood. He would never tell him. Instead, he got yet another dose of medicals. And he obeyed this time. And every time they came he accepted it. Trevor knew too well they broke him and shaped him like a piece of Tetris puzzle so he could fit in the line. He knew he lost himself in the process. But since he got separated, he couldn’t bring himself to care. And when they eventually let him out of the bright white hell, when they dressed him in a cheap second-hand suit and gave him a small place to live, he didn’t rebel. He obeyed. He followed the lead. He spoke to his shrink. He got a pet. He got a job. He drank water. He ate. He slept. He shat. The same fairy tale noir of a lonely life on repeat forever. He fit the line too well. Trevor let his hand slip from Silver’s back onto an armrest. Orange coloured light from outside mixed with neon from a place he could see through a narrow alley which led to his block of flats. A bright red, intrusive and obscene. A moth trap set up with fresh meet every week, he thought to himself. He eyed the place from his armchair and looked around. His last love interest came from that bar. All she left behind was a used toothbrush in a plastic cup on a kitchen sink, a pair of bob pins under the bed and lingering smell of cheap perfume piercing everything it touched with a brutal force. She was not that different from any other woman he ever knew. Each of them wanted money and stripped men of it by shaking their asses and burying faces into their sagging cleavages. Even if they did not admit it, be it high-class wive all glamour and chic or a grey mouse of an accountant in his shithole of a job, they all were miserable whores, bitches not worth a dollar yet they would surely kill for it if given a chance. They all wore insufferable perfumes and fake smiles that made his blood boil. Unfortunately, when he got a job as an assistant in a small branch of a Fleeca bank, he had no idea the place would be full of such creatures. He recalled the first day of work with a sigh, being yelled at for not bringing a latte for accountants, then for not fetching paper clips fast enough, and then again and again till he was let out in the afternoon, completely stripped of dignity and quite frankly, he didn’t even have the energy to sustain one at given time. Now that the fifth year of his atonement passed by, all he wanted was to burn the place down as a celebration. He hasn’t done it yet. His favourite coffee mug was there and he chose not to risk such a loss. The red light took over and illuminated his way when he carefully put Silver down and took a couple of careful steps towards an old cupboard and let it moan its screech into the night. With a light chuckle, he grabbed the colourful box realising they made his mind work in schedules and tech plans. He never put it on the same place two days in a row when he first came there. Now it had its fucking place right beside unused penis-shaped pasta he received in secret Santa game at work a couple of years ago. They had their place too. Never moved an inch. Trevor popped the lid and slid an elephant worth of pills into the palm of his. Funny how everything looks like candy a second before you start tripping balls. He knew the thrill too well. Fishing a dirty glass out of the sink, filling it with piss some still called water and swallow it like an obedient little bitch he was. Good, good. Let them keep you alive or let them kill you in ways which are not as fun as drugs. As he felt the chemicals taking rule over him, everything was good somehow. The room swayed. The colours exploded. He fell on the bed. Good. Good. Good.

#gtav #fanfic #alternative universe #trikey #trevor philips #michael de santa #real_fanta_sea.fic

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ithinkthingsaboutstuff · 5 years

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An Uninformed Rumour (TUA)

Hi everyone

I have chosen to do another character deep dive of my fav glamorous gossiper, Allison Hargreeves, The Rumour. much like my Grace deep dive i will be using one aspect of her to anchor my ideas, the focus will be on her as a mother as suggested but @nikkiwriteswords

(Disclaimer: I will be taking about Allison's relationship with Luther, now these are to be critical and analytical observations of the text but there is going to be some personal insights, in that i formulate an opinion based off the text, I am not a professional by any means so i am not qualified to talk about the overall topics of incest and/or abuse, but i will try to be as respectful as possible, but if there is something i get wrong or is distasteful, please politely point it out to me and i will either rewrite of get rid of whatever it may be if needed, I do not want any misinformation or anything accidentally hurtful here, but if that is the case i apologise and i will fix it)

now with that out of the way

Allison’s character is well crafted for may reason’s (as they all are) but want stands out to me and a lot of others is that she is a character in the middle of a transition.

from a self centred girl who got anything she wanted, when she wanted it and would do anything too just about anyone to get it, into trying to be a loving sister and in my opinion one of the true hero’s of the story

but for me she’s oh, i love her.

So what brought about this change? in order to do that, we must look at what lead up to her behaviour in the first place.

As a child

now the show lays it on thick that she wants or wanted attention

1- Vanya’s book, when saying this cuts to Allison

2- the fact she went to Hollywood and become a star and get roles she did not get off her own talent (rumouring for them)

3- she even has a posters of herself in her childhood bedroom (kid her, there are at lest 3)

in this image we see all the kids going to say good night to Hargreeves, Allison is front and centre, she is the standing the most straight, with her hands behind her back and she’s first to smile and the only one to be angry, note that

1- this leads me to believe that this whole lets say goodnight to Dad thing was her idea, as i said she is in front and is the only one who has an angry reaction

2- the fact she wants Hargreeves attention at all says she has some level of need for him she’s not getting anywhere else (her siblings or Grace, mind you that’s not to say they don’t care about her, it’s just not what she’s after)

3- her ‘he’s always busy’ means she might have tried this before,not this exact thing per say, but tiring to get his attention through acts like this, (e.g getting everyone together to do something or talk to Hargreeves)

4- this is adult Allison’s flashback

now this straight up neglect and rejection for Hargreeves time and time again, leads me two think that since she could not get what she wanted form Hargreeves she went to the next best thing in her mind, Luther

NOW let me be clear, when I say she went to Luther for attention it is because

1- He was Hargreeves favourite, his number one

2- she saw Luther (as first) as a way to understand what she needed to be to get to there father.

3- she probable did not do this intentionally, I think she simply did the opposite of what Diego did in that, Diego resented Luther and saw pulling away form him as being the same as pulling away for there father.

4- so Allison pulled Luther closer to try and be seen in the same way he was, to get what she thought was the love Luther got, (now we all know that Hargreeves did not love Luther, it was merely the perspiration of what the kids thought love was at the time)

Now this scene, were they broke the rules, Luther gave her the locket and Hargreeves interrupted them. a few things to note:

1- she must have come up here multiple times to set this up

2-they planned to go up together

3- it’s made to look like a like house with ‘framed paintings’ and ‘wallpaper’ she is literally playing house with Luther (also making it more clear she set it up, with Luther’s reaction to it)

4- Luther got her this locket WITHOUT Hargreeves finding out

5-Hargreeves dose not care that they are together he is mad that they disobeyed him

6- They NEVER came back up here

My guess is that this was when the kids started to turn on Hargreeves as shown by the fact Luther is breaking his fathers rules (getting the locket). now i know they broke rules as a group (donuts and the bowling ally) but this is the only time that we see them doing so individually (expect five but that’s why he’s gone)

Now Allison is starting to rebel, and seeing Luther as separate to there father, this was most likely when everyone else was starting to do the same. when they where all about to question what they where doing and why they should stay. I think even Luther to degree but since they never went back to this place until ‘the day that wasn’t’ I think Luther dug in his heels a bit to not break his fathers rules again (unless in the group)

This could be seen (by Hargreeves) as another example of her being selfish by distracting his number one and doing what she wants and not think about the team or the worlds needs. my guess is that she was told as much but not directly as that would give her some attention and she would do more things like this if that were the case (because he’s an ass-hole) but she did not, as i said they never came back up here.

1- she’s looking at the ground and not Hargreeves

2- Luther is looking at him

3-the lighting is colder in there face’s and warmer on there backs (the good time is behind them, they are not safe and warm anymore)

Then it happened, Ben died

This shook everyone of them to the core and was the turning point for just about all of them.

This is when Allison’s turn begin from a little girl who wanted her fathers attention, to the attention seeking, selfish diva.

I think the moment this path set in for her was the day she left but more specifically when she left Luther’s locket behind. Leaving it behind meant that, she was leaving her last connection to the umbrella academy behind to make a new life for herself.

also note that this is also when we see her first breaks a promise she made to herself and someone she cares about ‘I’ll never take it off”

Luther saw this as Allison leaving him behind as well because of this, he was wrong though. She said so her self in ‘We only see each other at weddings and funerals’

this scene in given more weight when Allison told Luther she wanted to leave.‘this place yes, but not you’ that’s what the locket was to her a product of the place and not the person how gave it to her. This also shows that in some ways she still see Luther as part of there father (even if just subconsciously). Meaning she never took Luther’s feelings about it into count (not that she meant to hurt him, it just never cross her mind that it would)

(I will finish this thought, when i get to her turn in the shows time line in ‘the day that wasn’t’)

(Side note I LOVE the re-watch value this show has)

As a Diva

Now we never see her fully absorbed into her diva self (expect the snip-it from ‘I heard a rumour’) but we know,

1- she did not get parts fairly

2- she did literally any role (Romcom’s, to Oscar bait movies i.e wheel chair lawyer, and oceans 8 in this universe nothing against that movie but it was a big cast with big names and Alison jumped on that band wagon)

3- she was superficial to the point that someone actually asked her what fashion brand she was going to wear to her fathers funeral (this one is on the paparazzi but they seemed really comfortable asking)

Now this leads me into the other part of her life her, husband Patrick and her daughter Clair

I think she did to Patrick what she tried to do with Luther but on a bigger scale, She’s playing house with him. Not to say she didn’t care about him just she build up a fantasy in her head of what her life should be and tried to fit him into that model. And she could probably do this relatively easy with or without her powers as we don’t really know the type of person he is outside of protecting his daughter from Allison’s powers.

so his is a somewhat decent person

but that doesn't mean he was not into her fame, money and overall willing to do as she asked, as she is by her own admission very controlling. so Patrick went in somewhat knowing this.

BUT there was only one person in Allison's life that was not swayed but her money, fame or words alone

her daughter.

As a Mother

ok now lets look at Allison as a parent before the start of the show, (or main plots timeline)

we see in 1x08 ‘I head a rumour’

that she is willing to MIND CONTROL her daughter into going to bed, now this scene on it own is not to harsh (for people how have not experienced abuse like this). but note that

1- that Allison tells Luther that she did this a lot to the point that I dare say Clair my not have been able to have much of a personally outside of what her mother demeaned for her (as i said she is playing house and she was losing so she cheated into get what she wanted)

2- she did it not just do this to her daughter but to anyone that was in her way, the Rumour's in the car (audio only) there’s soccer team, film roles, making someone her friend and of course the most damning being “i head a rumour that you love me”

Side note: I find it oddly hilarious that she had to rumour her way onto a soccer team, because she a trained superhero, but then again it could have had more to do with her inability to work on a team that made this needed

3- she did not see this as a bad thing (at first) as she said to Luther she felt like she just had an advantage, I feel like this is a common theme for her as through out her life that’s all she did take what ever advantage she had and ran with it (mind you this is most likely the instinct that kept her alive)

4- we see her plead with Patrick after he finds out but she did, not to say sorry but to simply let her explain.

We know what followed next for Allison a divorce and losing her child, 8 months before the funeral. at the funeral we see she is a very different and remorseful about what she has done to her daughter (as she said to Luther)

So what happened?

we know losing her daughter is what dives her to be better, but at what point did she realise she was wrong?

We don’t get this answer which i love because in transitions like this it’s never just one thing or moment that makes you question how wrong you were its reflection on everything you’ve done as shown in the car in ‘I heard a rumour’.

Moving on,

let’s talk about her as a mother in general now that i have laid out the ground work for Allison’s character,

I will do this by looking at the other mother in the show Grace,

(this pic looked cute, plus it was the only one i found of them in frame together)

Now both love there kid’s

But Grace as I have explored in my post ‘The Grace of motherhood’

Grace as a mother

1-get’s freedom and humanity form being a Mother

2- is build to be there Mother, it is her whole life

3- but is still a bit hands off in that she has no say in there hobbies, interests (out side of encouragement) and them leaving her in the end as she dose not try to keep them there either.

Now Allison as a mother

1- It’s not all that she is

2- she has a life out side of it she has a job, friends (not real ones) and her relationship with Patrick ect

3- is more controlling the Grace ever was, in that she wanted Clair to behave and act a certain way and will force it if necessary

4- using her powers all the time

now Allison dose change this mind set and what I find interesting is that she never compared herself to Hargreeves or Grace when taking about her parenting, nothing like,

i was just like Dad

i don’t know how Mom did it

Mom only had us and nothing else

Dad was never around so i tried to be there for Clair

In fact the closest she ever came to this was when talking about Grace ‘No wonder she lost her mind, to be away form yours kids.’even then this was out of empathy for Grace and in reflection not excusing or exampling her own choices.

This actually really in character for her actually because, as he says to Vanya again in reflection ‘Your an adult now Vanya, you don’t get to blame any of your problems on anyone but yourself.”

Theses are the words she lives by now, that sums up her arc to a tee.

She may have been left uniformed to how to be a good person by her father and was not given the tools to be a good mother but she can’t and won’t dell on that. This ambition chases her to make a lot of mistakes and she must reassess herself to try and find a better way. As she is not giving up on being a mother she just needs to find a better way to it.

Can i say how refreshing that is, as I see a lot of media going with someone is just a mother or they should be more than a mother (I’m not apposed to that story). but what i like about Allison and Grace is that it takes that idea and says, no one is Just a mother by happen chance (in that you actually care, love and support your children)

look at it this way, Grace and the audience found her humanity by realising that she cares and loves these kids and they care and love her.

Allison finds her personal redemption in being better person is the only way to be a better mother to Clair and that’s what she wants more than anything.

As a Hero

Now I said at the start that i see Allison as one of the main hero’s of this story and I meant that. But the thing I adore about it is how she did it.

She kept a promise.

what do i mean, I have already mentioned one of her promises

Promise 1- keeping Luther’s locket on,

In ‘the day that wasn't’ she put it back on when she gave up on the world and going to see Clair just before this scene.

she has it on and this the only time in the series that they are able to reconnect and find an understanding with one another, and Luther is also more open to her here and willing to move past his life and go with her to find something else (meeting Clair)

To ‘the day that was’ and Allison never put the locket back on and the whole thing went different as she went with five to save the world and Clair (five says so himself more or less)

now this made a ripple in there relationship when Luther when to the rave and was with a furry. now they connected in the phone booth but until then they were at odds about Vanya (a subject i’m not touching with a ten foot pole)

Promise 2- not to use her powers any more

she made this promise after losing Clair as way to insure that the things she had in her life where real and her’s.

she only beaks this promise when Vanya is getting out of control note that,

(i’ll use this angle as to not show blood)

1- She told Luther she doesn't do it any more because she ‘made a wish and she could not take it back’

2- she dose not use it against Hazel or Cha cha even tho they are trying to KILL her

3- she dose not use it on Leonard to get him away from Vanya or to tell her why he is hanging around Vanya

4- to get Patrick to let her talk to Clair

5- or to keep Clair for that matter (as she said to Luther)

Now when she did break her promise she did so hesitantly but it didn’t matter it ended badly for her, she was left without her voice.

But not voiceless

The Final promise and the only one she did not break.

Promise 3- be a better sister to Vanya

“all i ever wanted was to be a good sister to you”

breaking her own promises is what lead to her down fall, with Luther her daughter and then her own voice. she had let Vanya down there whole lives but not this time.

she was going to keep this promise even if it means the end of the world, she was not breaking another promise, not to herself and not to Vanya, (I love the dramatic irony of whenever Allison breaks her word bad things happen, almost like an anti-rumour)

But good god do i love this conclusion.

she spares Vanya as she can’t bring herself to kill her sister not when she knows why this is happening. They all had there parts to play in the end of the world and she did not want Vanya to be the only one who payed for it. Allison is trying to be better and she feels that Vanya is owed the same chance.

Vanya and Allison need each other and there brothers if they are going to fix this, fix themselves, to keep a simple promise they need to make to one another and themselves.

we need to try and be better.

and that is how Allison is one of the main hero’s of the show (for me anyway). she shows change in action, the mistakes and the learning curve that takes. The strength to look at yourself and say you did horrible things now it’s time to change. You can’t change what you did but you can be better. You can rebuild your relationship with your family it’s going to take work anger and pain but you can start again if you both want to.

and that’s how this chapter ends

with them having another chance (as kids) to do better by each other. If they can do it is something else all together. The love is there they just need the understanding.

that’s how the girl who wanted attention saved the world by paying attention.

#the umbrella academy #umbrella academy #allison hargreeves #luther hargreeves #vanya hargreeves #grace hargreeves #TUA #tua meta #long post #klaus hargreeves #number five #reginald hargreeves #holy shit this took forever #i would also like to point out that i am dyslexic #so if i used so words that might not fit then that's porbs why #apoc-eclipse

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